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When life feels unstable, artists often keep communities functioning •Harlem rent parties (1920s): neighbors held home concerts to cover rent; musicians played, a hat was passed, and information circulated alongside music. •Savoy Ballroom (opened 1926): one of the first racially integrated dance halls; social dancing doubled as community glue... across hard times. •Paradise Garage × GMHC (1982): the club hosted “Showers,” an early AIDS fundraiser, raising tens of thousands for community health. Parties = public health. •ACT UP + Gran Fury (late 1980s): artists turned posters, billboards, and bus ads into an information network when official messaging failed. •Wigstock (from 1984): a free outdoor drag festival that built connection and visibility amid the AIDS crisis. •ABC No Rio (founded 1980): a collectively run art space born from a housing protest; shows, zines, and organizing hub for a struggling Lower East Side. •Ballroom houses (1980s–90s): chosen-family networks that shared health info, hosted benefits, and offered material support alongside culture. In shaky moments, culture and art isn’t extra…it’s infrastructure. #ArtAsInfrastructure #ceramics #CommunityCare #NYCHistory #HarlemRenaissance #Ballroom #AIDSHistory #StreetArt #NightlifeHistoryshow more

Sebastian

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The Ghost in the Machine: How Player Pianos Sparked Protests, and What They Reveal About Our AI Future In the early 1900s, the player piano was a sensation. These self-playing instruments used perforated paper rolls fed through pneumatic mechanisms to reproduce complex piano performances automatically. By the 1910s to mid-1920s, they outsold ordinary pianos in many markets, filling American parlors, saloons, and theaters with ragtime, marches, and classical pieces. Great artists like Sergei Rachmaninoff and Ignace Paderewski cut rolls, preserving their interpretations for generations. It was automation that brought “live” music into every home, without the need for lessons or live performers. Yet this marvel triggered intense resistance. Composers and musicians saw it as an existential threat. In his fiery 1906 essay “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa warned that player pianos and phonographs would “substitute machinery for the human soul.” He predicted the death of amateur music-making: children would stop learning instruments, families would stop gathering around the piano, and music would lose its emotional depth. Sousa testified before Congress, helping drive the 1909 Copyright Act, which created compulsory licensing so composers could earn royalties from mechanical reproductions, a landmark victory born from protest. As “talkies” and radio displaced theater orchestras in the late 1920s, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) launched the Music Defense League in 1930. Funded by a tax on members, the union spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions in today’s dollars) on a national advertising blitz. Dramatic newspaper ads depicted sinister robots replacing human musicians, with slogans like “Is Art to Have a Tyrant?” and warnings that “canned music” would destroy jobs and degrade culture. The campaign targeted not just records but all mechanical music, including player pianos in public spaces. While there were no Luddite-style riots smashing machines (player pianos were mostly expensive home devices), the opposition was fierce: boycotts, lobbying, lawsuits, and cultural shaming of anyone who chose “the robot” over living performers. The protests did not kill the player piano. Record sales, radio, and the Great Depression did that by the early 1930s. But the episode left a lasting legacy: new copyright rules, heightened awareness of technology’s impact on artists, and a template for how workers respond to automation. We are living through the same story with AI and robotics. Generative models now compose music, write screenplays, generate art, and even perform. Musicians, writers, and visual artists are protesting in eerily familiar ways: lawsuits over unlicensed training data (the modern equivalent of the player-piano royalty fight), demands for “human-made” labels, strikes by Hollywood writers and actors, and public campaigns against “AI slop.” Fears echo Sousa’s exactly: loss of soul, authenticity, jobs, and human connection. “The robot is coming” ads of 1930 could run unchanged today, just swap “canned music” for “AI-generated content.” History’s lesson is nuanced. The player piano did not end music; it briefly coexisted with live performance before giving way to richer ecosystems. Rolls by legends now serve as priceless archives. Protests forced legal compromises that protected creators while allowing innovation. Yet real displacement happened. Thousands of theater musicians lost steady work, and the cultural shift toward passive consumption was real. Today’s AI moment carries higher stakes: it threatens not just one profession but broad swaths of cognitive and creative labor. Robots and AI could augment surgeons, drivers, teachers, and artists, or render many obsolete. The player-piano saga shows that raw Luddism rarely wins, We cannot stop technological progress, The music plays on. The question is: who, or what, plays it?

The Ghost in the Machine: How Player Pianos Sparked Protests, and What They Reveal About Our AI Future In the early 1900s, the player piano was a sensation. These self-playing instruments used perforated paper rolls fed through pneumatic mechanisms to reproduce complex piano performances automatically. By the 1910s to mid-1920s, they outsold ordinary pianos in many markets, filling American parlors, saloons, and theaters with ragtime, marches, and classical pieces. Great artists like Sergei Rachmaninoff and Ignace Paderewski cut rolls, preserving their interpretations for generations. It was automation that brought “live” music into every home, without the need for lessons or live performers. Yet this marvel triggered intense resistance. Composers and musicians saw it as an existential threat. In his fiery 1906 essay “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa warned that player pianos and phonographs would “substitute machinery for the human soul.” He predicted the death of amateur music-making: children would stop learning instruments, families would stop gathering around the piano, and music would lose its emotional depth. Sousa testified before Congress, helping drive the 1909 Copyright Act, which created compulsory licensing so composers could earn royalties from mechanical reproductions, a landmark victory born from protest. As “talkies” and radio displaced theater orchestras in the late 1920s, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) launched the Music Defense League in 1930. Funded by a tax on members, the union spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions in today’s dollars) on a national advertising blitz. Dramatic newspaper ads depicted sinister robots replacing human musicians, with slogans like “Is Art to Have a Tyrant?” and warnings that “canned music” would destroy jobs and degrade culture. The campaign targeted not just records but all mechanical music, including player pianos in public spaces. While there were no Luddite-style riots smashing machines (player pianos were mostly expensive home devices), the opposition was fierce: boycotts, lobbying, lawsuits, and cultural shaming of anyone who chose “the robot” over living performers. The protests did not kill the player piano. Record sales, radio, and the Great Depression did that by the early 1930s. But the episode left a lasting legacy: new copyright rules, heightened awareness of technology’s impact on artists, and a template for how workers respond to automation. We are living through the same story with AI and robotics. Generative models now compose music, write screenplays, generate art, and even perform. Musicians, writers, and visual artists are protesting in eerily familiar ways: lawsuits over unlicensed training data (the modern equivalent of the player-piano royalty fight), demands for “human-made” labels, strikes by Hollywood writers and actors, and public campaigns against “AI slop.” Fears echo Sousa’s exactly: loss of soul, authenticity, jobs, and human connection. “The robot is coming” ads of 1930 could run unchanged today, just swap “canned music” for “AI-generated content.” History’s lesson is nuanced. The player piano did not end music; it briefly coexisted with live performance before giving way to richer ecosystems. Rolls by legends now serve as priceless archives. Protests forced legal compromises that protected creators while allowing innovation. Yet real displacement happened. Thousands of theater musicians lost steady work, and the cultural shift toward passive consumption was real. Today’s AI moment carries higher stakes: it threatens not just one profession but broad swaths of cognitive and creative labor. Robots and AI could augment surgeons, drivers, teachers, and artists, or render many obsolete. The player-piano saga shows that raw Luddism rarely wins, We cannot stop technological progress, The music plays on. The question is: who, or what, plays it?

Brian Roemmele

118,152 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce

Fat Joe (Joseph Antonio Cartagena) is a Black Latino man of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent whose African ancestry, Bronx upbringing, and lifelong immersion in hip-hop culture make him an authentic representative of Black culture within the genre‼️. He has repeatedly affirmed this identity, including in conversations with Charlamagne tha God, and his body of work demonstrates concrete contributions that helped shape and expand hip-hop‼️. Puerto Rican and Cuban populations have significant African ancestry from the transatlantic slave trade; genetic studies and historical records show substantial West African admixture in both groups‼️. Fat Joe has publicly discussed his roots in these terms‼️. In appearances and discussions with Charlamagne (including Breakfast Club and related platforms), he has spoken about growing up in the South Bronx as a product of that mixed heritage‼️emphasizing the Black and Latino realities of the neighborhood that produced early hip-hop‼️. He has rejected attempts to erase the African component of his background, framing his origin as inseparable from the same street, cultural, and musical environment that Black Americans and Afro-Latinos shared in New York‼️. This is not performative; it aligns with how many Afro-Puerto Ricans and Afro-Cubans understand their identity: Black by blood and experience while also Latino by language, family, and nationality‼️. Hip-hop was born in the Bronx among Black and Puerto Rican youth‼️. Fat Joe came of age in that exact milieu in the 1980s–90s‼️. He did not enter the culture as an outsider; he was formed by it‼️block parties, battles, the same parks and projects that produced the foundational generation‼️. His accent, slang, fashion, swagger, and lyrical references have always been those of Bronx street culture, which is Black American at its core with heavy Afro-Latino participation‼️. He has consistently centered that shared experience rather than distancing himself from it‼️. Claiming otherwise ignores both genetics and the lived history of the genre’s birthplace‼️. Concrete Contributions to Hip-Hop Artist and label builder⁉️: As a solo artist and founder of Terror Squad, he gave platforms to artists (including Big Pun, who was also Puerto Rican with African ancestry) and helped keep hardcore East Coast street rap commercially viable in the late ’90s and early 2000s‼️. Hits that crossed over while staying rooted: “Lean Back,” “What’s Luv⁉️” (with Ashanti), “Make It Rain,” and collaborations with artists across the spectrum moved units and radio while retaining the aggressive, street-oriented sound associated with Black hip-hop of the era‼️. Cultural bridge without dilution⁉️: He brought Latino presence into mainstream hip-hop conversations without soft-pedaling the genre’s Black foundations‼️. His work with producers, rappers, and DJs from the core hip-hop community reinforced rather than diluted the culture‼️. Decades of consistent output, features, and public advocacy for the art form have kept him an active elder statesman who still speaks the language of the streets that created hip-hop‼️. When Fat Joe discusses his origins with Charlamagne, he is describing the same Bronx Black/Latino continuum that produced hip-hop itself‼️. His African ancestry is real, his cultural formation is real, and his contributions are measurable in records sold, artists launched, and the continued visibility of that New York street sound‼️. Attempts to separate him from Black culture require ignoring both genetics and the actual history of the genre he helped carry forward‼️.

Fat Joe (Joseph Antonio Cartagena) is a Black Latino man of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent whose African ancestry, Bronx upbringing, and lifelong immersion in hip-hop culture make him an authentic representative of Black culture within the genre‼️. He has repeatedly affirmed this identity, including in conversations with Charlamagne tha God, and his body of work demonstrates concrete contributions that helped shape and expand hip-hop‼️. Puerto Rican and Cuban populations have significant African ancestry from the transatlantic slave trade; genetic studies and historical records show substantial West African admixture in both groups‼️. Fat Joe has publicly discussed his roots in these terms‼️. In appearances and discussions with Charlamagne (including Breakfast Club and related platforms), he has spoken about growing up in the South Bronx as a product of that mixed heritage‼️emphasizing the Black and Latino realities of the neighborhood that produced early hip-hop‼️. He has rejected attempts to erase the African component of his background, framing his origin as inseparable from the same street, cultural, and musical environment that Black Americans and Afro-Latinos shared in New York‼️. This is not performative; it aligns with how many Afro-Puerto Ricans and Afro-Cubans understand their identity: Black by blood and experience while also Latino by language, family, and nationality‼️. Hip-hop was born in the Bronx among Black and Puerto Rican youth‼️. Fat Joe came of age in that exact milieu in the 1980s–90s‼️. He did not enter the culture as an outsider; he was formed by it‼️block parties, battles, the same parks and projects that produced the foundational generation‼️. His accent, slang, fashion, swagger, and lyrical references have always been those of Bronx street culture, which is Black American at its core with heavy Afro-Latino participation‼️. He has consistently centered that shared experience rather than distancing himself from it‼️. Claiming otherwise ignores both genetics and the lived history of the genre’s birthplace‼️. Concrete Contributions to Hip-Hop Artist and label builder⁉️: As a solo artist and founder of Terror Squad, he gave platforms to artists (including Big Pun, who was also Puerto Rican with African ancestry) and helped keep hardcore East Coast street rap commercially viable in the late ’90s and early 2000s‼️. Hits that crossed over while staying rooted: “Lean Back,” “What’s Luv⁉️” (with Ashanti), “Make It Rain,” and collaborations with artists across the spectrum moved units and radio while retaining the aggressive, street-oriented sound associated with Black hip-hop of the era‼️. Cultural bridge without dilution⁉️: He brought Latino presence into mainstream hip-hop conversations without soft-pedaling the genre’s Black foundations‼️. His work with producers, rappers, and DJs from the core hip-hop community reinforced rather than diluted the culture‼️. Decades of consistent output, features, and public advocacy for the art form have kept him an active elder statesman who still speaks the language of the streets that created hip-hop‼️. When Fat Joe discusses his origins with Charlamagne, he is describing the same Bronx Black/Latino continuum that produced hip-hop itself‼️. His African ancestry is real, his cultural formation is real, and his contributions are measurable in records sold, artists launched, and the continued visibility of that New York street sound‼️. Attempts to separate him from Black culture require ignoring both genetics and the actual history of the genre he helped carry forward‼️.

(st_ides)

32,675 görüntüleme • 19 gün önce

Destiny 2 left a permanent mark on my life. The memories I’ve made with this game, both as a player and as someone lucky enough to work on it, will forever stay with me. Not just because of late nights running King’s Fall with friends, or grinding out the Crucible Glorious Seal in solo queue like a complete maniac, but because Destiny 2 challenged me, shaped me, and pushed me toward becoming the creative I am today. My journey into digital art and photography started back in 2007, when I began taking screenshots in Halo 3 and entering Bungie community art contests. The relationships I built during that time eventually opened the door to an opportunity with Bungie’s Gameplay Capture team in 2014, helping the team capture footage for a new game called Destiny. I had no idea then that a commendably short two-week contract would turn into an incredible 12-year journey with this franchise. I originally came to Bungie hoping to pursue environmental concept art, but along the way I had the opportunity to work on marketing art and quickly fell in love with it. Creating marketing art for a franchise like Destiny challenged me in so many different ways. It forced me to expand my technical, creative, and communication skill sets, constantly adapt, and keep learning new tools and workflows just to keep pace with the live-service beast that was Destiny 2. It means a lot to be able to look back and say with confidence that I had a visual impact on Destiny 2; but the most meaningful part of it all was getting to work alongside and learn from so many incredible artists at Bungie, and seeing firsthand just how much care, effort, and humanity it takes to make work like this possible. It’s hard to fully capture how much energy, skill, and collaboration goes into every visual part of a game like Destiny 2. That work is shaped by artists from different backgrounds, experiences, disciplines, and perspectives. Each of them, including me, left a small part of themselves in what they created. To me, that’s what makes a game like Destiny 2 feel truly meaningful and memorable. Especially now, in a world increasingly saturated with content and driven by instant output and gratification through AI, I keep coming back to the value of process. For me, and for so many of my peers, it was never only about arriving at the final image. It was about the journey it took to get there. The late nights. The iteration. The problem-solving. The trust. The shared pursuit of trying to make something special. To my peers, I’m deeply proud of what we built together, but even more grateful for how we built it. We challenged each other, inspired each other, and kept showing up for one another through every high and low, as Destiny 2 has had many. That kind of shared effort leaves a lasting mark. What we made mattered. What we gave mattered. And the impact of what we built together will stay with us, and this community, for a long time. Shoutout to the current and former members of Creative Studios, the VizD team, and the many Bungie developers and marketers who helped shape this chapter of my life. I’m especially grateful to the teammates who believed in me, encouraged me to embrace failure and new beginnings as essential parts of artistic growth, and pushed me to take on challenges even when they felt beyond my reach. You showed me that the strength of a team will always surpass that of any individual hero. As my work on #Destiny2 comes to a close and I look toward the future, I plan to spend the next few weeks sharing some of the pieces I had the chance to create or art direct that mean the most to me. For now, I’ll leave you all with a collage of some of my personal favorite pieces to work on across Destiny 2’s lifetime. These projects mean so much to me because many of them started as personal passion projects or late-night concept sketches, inspired by playing early builds of Destiny 2 and by the incredible work of our development team.

Destiny 2 left a permanent mark on my life. The memories I’ve made with this game, both as a player and as someone lucky enough to work on it, will forever stay with me. Not just because of late nights running King’s Fall with friends, or grinding out the Crucible Glorious Seal in solo queue like a complete maniac, but because Destiny 2 challenged me, shaped me, and pushed me toward becoming the creative I am today. My journey into digital art and photography started back in 2007, when I began taking screenshots in Halo 3 and entering Bungie community art contests. The relationships I built during that time eventually opened the door to an opportunity with Bungie’s Gameplay Capture team in 2014, helping the team capture footage for a new game called Destiny. I had no idea then that a commendably short two-week contract would turn into an incredible 12-year journey with this franchise. I originally came to Bungie hoping to pursue environmental concept art, but along the way I had the opportunity to work on marketing art and quickly fell in love with it. Creating marketing art for a franchise like Destiny challenged me in so many different ways. It forced me to expand my technical, creative, and communication skill sets, constantly adapt, and keep learning new tools and workflows just to keep pace with the live-service beast that was Destiny 2. It means a lot to be able to look back and say with confidence that I had a visual impact on Destiny 2; but the most meaningful part of it all was getting to work alongside and learn from so many incredible artists at Bungie, and seeing firsthand just how much care, effort, and humanity it takes to make work like this possible. It’s hard to fully capture how much energy, skill, and collaboration goes into every visual part of a game like Destiny 2. That work is shaped by artists from different backgrounds, experiences, disciplines, and perspectives. Each of them, including me, left a small part of themselves in what they created. To me, that’s what makes a game like Destiny 2 feel truly meaningful and memorable. Especially now, in a world increasingly saturated with content and driven by instant output and gratification through AI, I keep coming back to the value of process. For me, and for so many of my peers, it was never only about arriving at the final image. It was about the journey it took to get there. The late nights. The iteration. The problem-solving. The trust. The shared pursuit of trying to make something special. To my peers, I’m deeply proud of what we built together, but even more grateful for how we built it. We challenged each other, inspired each other, and kept showing up for one another through every high and low, as Destiny 2 has had many. That kind of shared effort leaves a lasting mark. What we made mattered. What we gave mattered. And the impact of what we built together will stay with us, and this community, for a long time. Shoutout to the current and former members of Creative Studios, the VizD team, and the many Bungie developers and marketers who helped shape this chapter of my life. I’m especially grateful to the teammates who believed in me, encouraged me to embrace failure and new beginnings as essential parts of artistic growth, and pushed me to take on challenges even when they felt beyond my reach. You showed me that the strength of a team will always surpass that of any individual hero. As my work on #Destiny2 comes to a close and I look toward the future, I plan to spend the next few weeks sharing some of the pieces I had the chance to create or art direct that mean the most to me. For now, I’ll leave you all with a collage of some of my personal favorite pieces to work on across Destiny 2’s lifetime. These projects mean so much to me because many of them started as personal passion projects or late-night concept sketches, inspired by playing early builds of Destiny 2 and by the incredible work of our development team.

Biwald

73,277 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce

Gm! Our recent acquisition of 6529 Gradient #96 meant to orient our mission going forward, after 5 years of grassroots building. Today, we announce our biggest Common Good project yet, Formosa 6529, a permanent IRL exhibition of The Memes and 6529 network NFTs: Catch our founder HugoFaz.6529 on justinaversano's Moments of the Unknown to hear all about it, visit the website above or read more below. Common Goods are meant to reach and benefit the masses. The 6529 network has been funding and buidling over the years a massive public cultural archive of CC0 Art — intellectual property that belongs to all — in a revolutionary change of paradigm. However, the scale and cultural significance of The Memes as an art collection/movement has so far remained largely untapped. Beyond our core web3 communities, few ever get see, interact, much less use this vast archive to... spread the memes of decentralization, foster local creative economies, educate about crypto, monetize with branding, repurpose content, teach and learn creative techniques, or even just to enjoy amazing, groundbreaking art. There is no other CC0 contemporary art project of this scale and importance and the world needs to use it. It's time then we give 6529 its first permanent IRL home so it can be truly appreciated. Enter Formosa, a prime public gallery space built during Brazil's golden modernist years in the first half of the 20th century to host art events that aimed to deconstruct and repurpose the imported, colonialist artistic trends coming from Europe and devise an original brazilian art movement. From fusion restaurants to art schools to performative theater installations, Formosa Gallery thrived through successive occupations until finally enduring decades of abandon and misuse around the turn of the century. Recently, it was set to be restored and given purpose beyond its former glory, and we were there to propose the best possible turnaround for the space... Over years of negotiation with private and governmental parties, we managed to approve with public authorities a double use for the space: a private high-fidelity vinyl listening bar and restaurant — which is already operating — and a 100% public domain digital art gallery. Featuring up to 25 state-of-the-art digital screens ranging from 85 to 50 inches, Formosa 6529 will be the best and largest dedicated permanent exhibition of any web3 project. With rotating exhibitions of The Memes, NextGen and all future 6529 projects, Brain will have direct input on exhibitions via decentralized voting on curatorial proposals made by the community. To give us institutional freedom and censorship resistance, we decided to fully decentralize the funding for Formosa Gallery's installation and operation. Let's find out together what happens when we unleash CC0 art to the public! Daytime, Formosa 6529 will be fully open for free visitation. Occupying a busy public passageway under the historic Tea Bridge linking the Municipal Theatre to the City Hall, intentional visitors and hundreds of passerbys alike will be impacted by the exhibits. We will host many activities to showcase the power of The Memes and CC0 art: royalty-free merch sales by local craftspeople, artist rememe competitions, school guided tours, meme fashion shows, art and tech workshops, and many other activations the network can help us come up with. And every night, the Hi-Fi audience of 300-400 affluent Paulistas and tourists occupy Formosa Gallery sipping drinks and (now) discussing the latest Memes exhibit while waiting for their place in the listening bar. The Fundraiser for Formosa 6529 is open now and runs until November 15th. At a glance : The initial funding will require a minimum of 24 Ξ, which will cover: - All necessary infrastructure and interior adaptations - Equipment purchase and installation - Overhead costs for the grand opening event and for the entire 1st year of operation, opening day and night (mostly human resources – guides, security, tech, comms – and taxes) Funding will happen in 2 stages, the first of which is now open: 30 Meme Card Artists have generously committed to create and donate a new piece for this fundraiser; their names will be announced over the course of these 2 weeks. The unrevealed 1-of-1s are available here: Contributions are fully refundable if the fundraiser does not reach minimum threshold. If we succeed, the works will be revealed live in a randomized draw during the Grand Opening in January. The second stage will consist of a Meme Card, to allow for wider network participation, and only happens after the first stage is successful. Please visit for more information on funding rewards and goals, the FAQ, or reach out here or dm us at 6529 with any questions! This project is only possible due to the power of web3 and the network of believers in a decentralized future powered by NFTs. We can't wait to bring Formosa to life, and to have you here IRL with us for the exhibitions and to have a great time.

Gm! Our recent acquisition of 6529 Gradient #96 meant to orient our mission going forward, after 5 years of grassroots building. Today, we announce our biggest Common Good project yet, Formosa 6529, a permanent IRL exhibition of The Memes and 6529 network NFTs: Catch our founder HugoFaz.6529 on justinaversano's Moments of the Unknown to hear all about it, visit the website above or read more below. Common Goods are meant to reach and benefit the masses. The 6529 network has been funding and buidling over the years a massive public cultural archive of CC0 Art — intellectual property that belongs to all — in a revolutionary change of paradigm. However, the scale and cultural significance of The Memes as an art collection/movement has so far remained largely untapped. Beyond our core web3 communities, few ever get see, interact, much less use this vast archive to... spread the memes of decentralization, foster local creative economies, educate about crypto, monetize with branding, repurpose content, teach and learn creative techniques, or even just to enjoy amazing, groundbreaking art. There is no other CC0 contemporary art project of this scale and importance and the world needs to use it. It's time then we give 6529 its first permanent IRL home so it can be truly appreciated. Enter Formosa, a prime public gallery space built during Brazil's golden modernist years in the first half of the 20th century to host art events that aimed to deconstruct and repurpose the imported, colonialist artistic trends coming from Europe and devise an original brazilian art movement. From fusion restaurants to art schools to performative theater installations, Formosa Gallery thrived through successive occupations until finally enduring decades of abandon and misuse around the turn of the century. Recently, it was set to be restored and given purpose beyond its former glory, and we were there to propose the best possible turnaround for the space... Over years of negotiation with private and governmental parties, we managed to approve with public authorities a double use for the space: a private high-fidelity vinyl listening bar and restaurant — which is already operating — and a 100% public domain digital art gallery. Featuring up to 25 state-of-the-art digital screens ranging from 85 to 50 inches, Formosa 6529 will be the best and largest dedicated permanent exhibition of any web3 project. With rotating exhibitions of The Memes, NextGen and all future 6529 projects, Brain will have direct input on exhibitions via decentralized voting on curatorial proposals made by the community. To give us institutional freedom and censorship resistance, we decided to fully decentralize the funding for Formosa Gallery's installation and operation. Let's find out together what happens when we unleash CC0 art to the public! Daytime, Formosa 6529 will be fully open for free visitation. Occupying a busy public passageway under the historic Tea Bridge linking the Municipal Theatre to the City Hall, intentional visitors and hundreds of passerbys alike will be impacted by the exhibits. We will host many activities to showcase the power of The Memes and CC0 art: royalty-free merch sales by local craftspeople, artist rememe competitions, school guided tours, meme fashion shows, art and tech workshops, and many other activations the network can help us come up with. And every night, the Hi-Fi audience of 300-400 affluent Paulistas and tourists occupy Formosa Gallery sipping drinks and (now) discussing the latest Memes exhibit while waiting for their place in the listening bar. The Fundraiser for Formosa 6529 is open now and runs until November 15th. At a glance : The initial funding will require a minimum of 24 Ξ, which will cover: - All necessary infrastructure and interior adaptations - Equipment purchase and installation - Overhead costs for the grand opening event and for the entire 1st year of operation, opening day and night (mostly human resources – guides, security, tech, comms – and taxes) Funding will happen in 2 stages, the first of which is now open: 30 Meme Card Artists have generously committed to create and donate a new piece for this fundraiser; their names will be announced over the course of these 2 weeks. The unrevealed 1-of-1s are available here: Contributions are fully refundable if the fundraiser does not reach minimum threshold. If we succeed, the works will be revealed live in a randomized draw during the Grand Opening in January. The second stage will consist of a Meme Card, to allow for wider network participation, and only happens after the first stage is successful. Please visit for more information on funding rewards and goals, the FAQ, or reach out here or dm us at 6529 with any questions! This project is only possible due to the power of web3 and the network of believers in a decentralized future powered by NFTs. We can't wait to bring Formosa to life, and to have you here IRL with us for the exhibitions and to have a great time.

CasaNUA.6529

51,122 görüntüleme • 10 ay önce

$The election of a charismatic democratic socialist as the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate yesterday stunned New York's political establishment and appears to signal the most radical shift in city politics in a generation. With no executive experience, limited name recognition, and a fraction of the budget of his rival, a 33-year-old State Assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani defeated former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo outright in the Democratic primary, winning 44 percent of the vote in the first round and avoiding a runoff entirely. Mamdani’s rise was powered by younger, progressive voters hungry for moral clarity and economic redistribution. Mamdani is a practicing Muslim and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018. He is a true political star, radiating warmth and intelligence. Mamdani called for a citywide rent freeze, universal rent control, fare-free public transit, and city-run grocery stores — all without raising taxes on working- and middle-class New Yorkers. But if Mamdani wins the general election in November and implements his policies, their impact would be disastrous for the people of New York City, including the poor, the working class, and many of the young voters who carried him to victory. A citywide rent freeze and expanded rent control would choke new housing supply, discourage landlords from maintaining existing units, and entrench inequality by rewarding incumbency while locking out newcomers. The evidence is already stark: New York City's acknowledgment on February 8 that the latest Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS), a study of housing conditions, shows the rental vacancy rate in early 2023 at 1.4 percent, the lowest in more than 50 years. This crisis emerged after the 2019 rent laws that Mamdani wants to expand. Berlin tried a similar approach in 2020; construction collapsed, black markets emerged, and rents ultimately surged when the courts overturned the law. Mamdani's plan to eliminate transit fares would exacerbate the Metropolitan Transit Authority's multibillion-dollar deficit and compromise service quality in a system already operating at capacity. His proposal for city-run grocery stores ignores Chicago’s failed attempt, where poor oversight led to spoiled food, inventory gaps, and unsustainable losses. And his pledge to slash the NYPD budget comes at a time when violent crime remains elevated, assaults on transit workers are rising, and 911 response times lag across the boroughs. Mamdani is raising legitimate concerns, including on affordability and the city’s poor treatment of the mentally ill. From 1968 to 2024, the full span of New York’s current rent stabilization system, rents went up 1,017 percent, while costs for all other measured goods rose 826 percent. Public transit in New York is expensive and unreliable, grocery prices are punishing, and far too many mentally ill New Yorkers are left untreated on the streets, cycling through shelters, jails, and emergency rooms. In April 2025, 108,464 people slept each night in NYC shelters, while the majority of unsheltered homeless individuals are people living with a mental illness or other severe health problems. Mamdani’s willingness to confront issues that the other candidates evaded made him a symbol of hope for voters who rightly feel abandoned. But Mamdani’s proposals would make each of those issues worse, not better. A citywide rent freeze and expanded rent control would drive down construction, accelerate building withdrawal, and deepen the housing shortage. Operating costs of buildings containing rent-stabilized apartments already increased by 6.3 percent between 2024 and 2025. His call for fare-free public transit ignores the experience of other cities where eliminating fares led to overcrowding, reduced reliability, and funding crises. His plan to establish city-run grocery stores fails to take into account operational challenges. On safety, Mamdani pledges to remove police from schools, public housing, and subways, even as violent crime remains above pre-pandemic levels. And on mental illness, his opposition to court-ordered treatmentwould leave people in psychosis on the streets, untreated and deteriorating. And the people those policies would most harm would be many of the very people Mamdani claims to care most about. It would be low-income renters who find themselves unable to move because no new units are being built. It would be transit-dependent workers in the outer boroughs who rely on reliable subway service but would be left waiting for overcrowded, underfunded trains. It would be families in food deserts who need access to affordable groceries, not government-run stores plagued by mismanagement and waste. It would be children in public schools, tenants in public housing, and straphangers who face rising violence and would see fewer officers on patrol. And it would be the mentally ill and addicts themselves in crisis who need an intervention, not just outreach, left to suffer on sidewalks and subway platforms in the name of autonomy. Why then did he win such a resounding victory, particularly from those voters under 40 years old? ... Please subscribe to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, watch the full video, and read the rest of this article coauthored with Alex Gutentag alex gutentag !$

The election of a charismatic democratic socialist as the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate yesterday stunned New York's political establishment and appears to signal the most radical shift in city politics in a generation. With no executive experience, limited name recognition, and a fraction of the budget of his rival, a 33-year-old State Assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani defeated former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo outright in the Democratic primary, winning 44 percent of the vote in the first round and avoiding a runoff entirely. Mamdani’s rise was powered by younger, progressive voters hungry for moral clarity and economic redistribution. Mamdani is a practicing Muslim and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018. He is a true political star, radiating warmth and intelligence. Mamdani called for a citywide rent freeze, universal rent control, fare-free public transit, and city-run grocery stores — all without raising taxes on working- and middle-class New Yorkers. But if Mamdani wins the general election in November and implements his policies, their impact would be disastrous for the people of New York City, including the poor, the working class, and many of the young voters who carried him to victory. A citywide rent freeze and expanded rent control would choke new housing supply, discourage landlords from maintaining existing units, and entrench inequality by rewarding incumbency while locking out newcomers. The evidence is already stark: New York City's acknowledgment on February 8 that the latest Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS), a study of housing conditions, shows the rental vacancy rate in early 2023 at 1.4 percent, the lowest in more than 50 years. This crisis emerged after the 2019 rent laws that Mamdani wants to expand. Berlin tried a similar approach in 2020; construction collapsed, black markets emerged, and rents ultimately surged when the courts overturned the law. Mamdani's plan to eliminate transit fares would exacerbate the Metropolitan Transit Authority's multibillion-dollar deficit and compromise service quality in a system already operating at capacity. His proposal for city-run grocery stores ignores Chicago’s failed attempt, where poor oversight led to spoiled food, inventory gaps, and unsustainable losses. And his pledge to slash the NYPD budget comes at a time when violent crime remains elevated, assaults on transit workers are rising, and 911 response times lag across the boroughs. Mamdani is raising legitimate concerns, including on affordability and the city’s poor treatment of the mentally ill. From 1968 to 2024, the full span of New York’s current rent stabilization system, rents went up 1,017 percent, while costs for all other measured goods rose 826 percent. Public transit in New York is expensive and unreliable, grocery prices are punishing, and far too many mentally ill New Yorkers are left untreated on the streets, cycling through shelters, jails, and emergency rooms. In April 2025, 108,464 people slept each night in NYC shelters, while the majority of unsheltered homeless individuals are people living with a mental illness or other severe health problems. Mamdani’s willingness to confront issues that the other candidates evaded made him a symbol of hope for voters who rightly feel abandoned. But Mamdani’s proposals would make each of those issues worse, not better. A citywide rent freeze and expanded rent control would drive down construction, accelerate building withdrawal, and deepen the housing shortage. Operating costs of buildings containing rent-stabilized apartments already increased by 6.3 percent between 2024 and 2025. His call for fare-free public transit ignores the experience of other cities where eliminating fares led to overcrowding, reduced reliability, and funding crises. His plan to establish city-run grocery stores fails to take into account operational challenges. On safety, Mamdani pledges to remove police from schools, public housing, and subways, even as violent crime remains above pre-pandemic levels. And on mental illness, his opposition to court-ordered treatmentwould leave people in psychosis on the streets, untreated and deteriorating. And the people those policies would most harm would be many of the very people Mamdani claims to care most about. It would be low-income renters who find themselves unable to move because no new units are being built. It would be transit-dependent workers in the outer boroughs who rely on reliable subway service but would be left waiting for overcrowded, underfunded trains. It would be families in food deserts who need access to affordable groceries, not government-run stores plagued by mismanagement and waste. It would be children in public schools, tenants in public housing, and straphangers who face rising violence and would see fewer officers on patrol. And it would be the mentally ill and addicts themselves in crisis who need an intervention, not just outreach, left to suffer on sidewalks and subway platforms in the name of autonomy. Why then did he win such a resounding victory, particularly from those voters under 40 years old? ... Please subscribe to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, watch the full video, and read the rest of this article coauthored with Alex Gutentag alex gutentag !

Michael Shellenberger

182,912 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce

On March 15th, 2021, an anonymous Twitter user asked Harvard Medical professor Martin Kulldorff a question. “Do you think younger age groups and or people who have already had the virus need to be vaccinated?” Who is Martin Kulldorff? He’s a Harvard Medical School professor for 21 years, a well-known Swedish biostatistician who developed widely used software for disease mapping, the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration on how to deal with the COVID pandemic, and an advisor to the world’s leading health organizations. What he said was that “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should get COVID. Vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it, nor do children.” Natural immunity. Is it a myth — a “conspiracy theory” — that once you have been sick from a virus, then you won’t get sick, or as sick, again? In fact, we’ve known for 2,500 years that natural immunity is real. “The same man was never attacked twice, never at least fatally,” wrote Thucydides, describing the plague of Athens. He observed that recovered individuals could safely nurse the sick without falling ill themselves. And yet Twitter censored Martin Kulldorff’s tweet. “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine,” read a warning that Twitter employees put on it. For most people, the Tweet cannot be replied to, shared or liked. In other words, Twitter had decided that this professor at Harvard Medical School was wrong, and that natural immunity wasn’t really something that could protect you from COVID. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s currently our Director of the National Institutes of Health, and thus one of the highest-ranking public health officials in the world, was a Stanford epidemiologist before that. Twitter put him on a “Trends Blacklist.” Not long before we discovered this, we were told that shadow-banning was a conspiracy theory, because Twitter had said it didn’t shadow-ban. Now the European Commission is trying to censor the entire global internet. They want to put a 140 million Euro fine on X. They want to end anonymity, which was what allowed that question of Kulldorff to be asked. They want to use a “Democracy Shield” program to shield the Commission from democracy. And the Commission wants to impose “chat control” so they can read your private messages. It just gets worse and worse. Unsubstantiated and likely false claims of Russian government election interference through TikTok and social media were made in Romania and in the Czech Republic. Truth is not something that anybody holds as a possession and rather emerges through dialogue. We’ve known that since Plato and Socrates. We need free speech for science, public health, and national security. It’s essential to journalism, democracy, and human freedom. Free speech enabled civilization; censorship threatens it. This is the only political cause that I would die for. And yet there is currently an active coordination between Stanford, Brazil, Australia, and others to impose what I think we can call, without exaggeration, global totalitarianism. They’re pushing for digital identification that will end anonymity online. Why is that? Why are these guys behaving in this way? When Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 28th, 2022, unprecedented insight into multiple secret government mass censorship efforts emerged from this exploration. We had unlimited access to Twitter files. They revealed that the mainstream news reporters, who don’t deserve the name, were demanding censorship. No true journalist demands censorship of his fellow journalists. What emerged from this was an understanding of something we call the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” which directly grew out of the military industrial complex and was run by active or former intelligence community officials who often operate under that banner. It led to multiple congressional investigations and hearings, and it spread across every social media platform. So we now know the censorship that occurred, not just at Twitter, but at YouTube, at Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms. What is the Censorship Industrial Complex? The model isn’t that complicated to understand. The government chooses people whom they call “researchers” to serve as censors. These are government-funded individuals who often come from the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment. They work at non-governmental organizations funded by governments or at universities funded by governments. They conduct “fact checks” to serve as “trusted flaggers.” These “trusted flaggers” demand censorship by social media platforms. It’s all done in secret. They’re looking to censor narratives. This is essential because, as decades of good cognitive science have shown, people understand and retain information through storytelling. We think in terms of stories, not bullet points. And so they were out to censor whole narratives. From the Stanford censorship project on COVID, the “Virality Project,” they said they wanted to censor “true stories” of vaccine side effects. Why? Because it might “fuel hesitancy.” In other words, they want to control your behavior. They don’t want you to receive true information that might lead you to not get the vaccine. If that isn’t totalitarianism straight out of 1984, I don’t know what it. These people were on the verge of passing legislation in the United States that would’ve authorized the National Science Foundation to choose these “researcher” censors. I’m presenting slides to Europeans and the world for situational awareness into what totalitarian politicians and bureaucrats have planned because this is still going strong. Stanford helped the US government censor COVID dissidents, and then they lied about it. You might be detecting a pattern. They’re really not interested in censoring “misinformation.’ They’re very interested in censoring true information. The censors flagged an Israeli preprint which came out in December, 2020 and found, lo and behold, that natural immunity is a real thing. In fact, it’s more protective than the vaccine. But the censors flagged somebody’s Google Drive. “See the following Google Drive links being used to compile testimonies about vaccine shedding, Covid videos, showing side effects and whatnot.” Google then removed that content from that person’s Google Drive. You don’t control your Google Drive. Contrary to Stanford’s claim that the project did not ask social media platforms to remove any content, they privately said they did. And we know that many hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook posts were removed, even though they were a hundred percent accurate. In fact, in 2021, Stanford’s “Virality Project” flagged accurate claims that the World Health Organization did not recommend vaccinating children. The people who spread the misinformation are the people demanding the censorship. They claimed Covid couldn’t have come from a lab, that the Covid vaccine prevented infection, and that natural immunity didn’t exist. The only solution to hate speech and misinformation is free speech. If you censor false information, how would anybody get the true information? The whole point is the debate. They lied when they said false information travels faster than true information. It’s a completely bogus study and involved six seconds of content on Twitter. Who are these people? As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they called them “Bu alumni.” They created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. Intriguingly, we discovered that the general counsel of the FBI — arguably the second most powerful person of the FBI, or maybe the first, if you think, consider that what their actual job is to decide what the FBI can and can’t do — resigned from FBI in early 2020 and went to Twitter to take the deputy general counsel role. Isn’t that interesting? Somebody in one of the most powerful legal positions in the world would take a junior legal role at a social media company. Why would that be? This email popped up when we were going through Twitter files and it really jumped out at us. It’s from the director of policy at Twitter. “We have seen a sustained if uncoordinated” — supposedly — “effort by the intelligence community to push us to share more information and change our API policies. They’re probing and pushing everywhere they can.” The Hunter Biden laptop censorship occurred later that year. The FBI and the intelligence community discredited accurate, factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both before and after the New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14th, 2020. How could the FBI spread false information about something that nobody knew about? Because the FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop, which showed his family’s massive influence peddling scheme. It consisted of accepting tens of millions of dollars, including from the Chinese government. The FBI had been sitting on that laptop since December of 2019. They had been given it by the computer repair store owner, who had been given the laptop by Hunter Biden, likely because he dropped it in his bathtub or in the pool, when he was on one of his many crack and alcohol benders. The government strategy is always the same: spread disinformation first, then demand censorship of accurate information on the basis of it . “The FBI came to us in the summer of 2020,” Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan two years later, “and they were like, ‘Hey, you should be on the alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016. There’s about to be some kind of dump.’” In the summer of 2020, the New York Post had not published the story about the Hunter Biden laptop. It would only come out in October. We see something very interesting show up in the Twitter files: the Aspen Institute, an intermediary between the intelligence community and the public. It’s known as a Davos-style gab fest in the United States. It’s also the place where intelligence community operations are run. They hosted a workshop to train reporters and all of the social media’s top censorship officials, known as “trust and safety officials,” how to deal with a story they would hear in the future relating to Hunter Biden and Barisma. A few months earlier, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center had published a report attacking what we in the United States call the Pentagon Papers Principle. The Pentagon Papers Principle says that if a government official gives me, a journalist, a bunch of Pentagon documents showing that we’re losing the war in Vietnam, I, as a journalist, can publish them, and not risk prison. That was decided in a famous Supreme Court case in 1971. Stanford argued that, really, we should get rid of that principle, which may be the most important investigative journalism principle in the United States, and said, “You should cover the person who leaked the materials, not the leaked emails.” In other words, you should cover and expose the whistleblower. The person who exposed the Pentagon Papers is the real bad guy, not the DOD, CIA, and presidents who had lied to us for over a decade. Stanford was training the journalists and the social media trust and safety officers in how to cover a story that had not yet come out. This is known as “pre-bunking,” and it’s also part of the European Union strategy to shield themselves from democracy. When the Hunter Biden story appeared October 22nd, Twitter’s trust and safety censorship official said it didn’t violate its terms of service. There’s nothing illegal about any of this. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that you’re allowed to report on information that’s been leaked to you. At that moment, the former FBI general counsel, Jim Baker, argued vigorously that Twitter really needed to censor it. Baker won and they censored the story. It’s not that we didn’t hear about the Hunter Biden laptop story when it came out. I certainly did. But we had the impression that there was something wrong with it, that it was not really the whole story. And so many of us dismissed it. What they had done was a psyop on this major story. They had changed our perception of the story. And it worked. It worked on me, it worked on everybody I knew. What is the role of the intelligence community of social media companies? The former CIA people are the head of elections at Meta, and Google’s head of trust and safety. Former and current CIA officers have a history of spreading misinformation and promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory. We now know that between 2018 and 2023, there were 36 people from the CIA 68 from the FBI 44, from the National Security Administration and 68 from the Department of Homeland Security who had moved to work at the social media platforms. This is not unique to the United States. My colleague Cecilia Jilková, the daughter of famous Czech dissidents, discovered that European Union officials claimed, days before the European elections in 2024, that a “pro-Kremlin website” was spreading propaganda and were paying off European politicians. That was the headline in Politico. We wrote to them and asked, “Where’s the evidence of this? Just go ahead and share the evidence to support your accusation days before the European parliamentary elections.” Nobody was arrested. They never produced the evidence. The former Czech president, Václav Klaus, who was accused of this, said, “We don’t even know what the ‘Voice of Europe’ is.” Another Czech politician said, “How could I have known it would be a security threat? At the time I gave the interview, they weren’t on any list.” Another said, “If they’re such a big threat, why did the European Parliament let the Voice of Europe’s journalists inside?” Nobody responded. Nobody talked to us. This was a disinformation campaign carried by Politico, which, in my view, is a suspect publication. In the spring of 2022, Barack Obama went to Stanford to give a speech at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center run by Michael McFaul, his former ambassador to Russia. Obama said misinformation harms democracy and urged support for legislation in Congress that would empower government-appointed researchers to serve as “trusted flaggers.” Six days later, the Department of Homeland Security rolled out their Disinformation Governance Board. What a coincidence that they got Obama to frame the issue for them. Facebook in 2021 censored accurate vaccine information so the White House would help it to get data from Europe. In addition to removing vaccine misinformation, wrote Facebook to the White House, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation. White House said jump, and Facebook said how high? Why did they do it? Why would they voluntarily censor? This also emerged from the Facebook files. Nick Clegg on the left wrote an email to his colleagues. He said, “My sense is that given we’ve got bigger fish, we have to fry with the administration, e.g., data flows, it doesn’t seem like a great place for us to be.” Data flows. What’s he talking about? He’s talking about billions of dollars worth of business that he has to, that they would have to pay the European Commission for if they didn’t have the support from the Biden administration to lean on the European Commission. In other words, this was a shakedown by the White House of Facebook and it worked in France, the country of Liberté. Turns out it has a special role.... Please subscribe now to support Public's defense of free speech, watch the full video, and read the rest of the article!

On March 15th, 2021, an anonymous Twitter user asked Harvard Medical professor Martin Kulldorff a question. “Do you think younger age groups and or people who have already had the virus need to be vaccinated?” Who is Martin Kulldorff? He’s a Harvard Medical School professor for 21 years, a well-known Swedish biostatistician who developed widely used software for disease mapping, the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration on how to deal with the COVID pandemic, and an advisor to the world’s leading health organizations. What he said was that “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should get COVID. Vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it, nor do children.” Natural immunity. Is it a myth — a “conspiracy theory” — that once you have been sick from a virus, then you won’t get sick, or as sick, again? In fact, we’ve known for 2,500 years that natural immunity is real. “The same man was never attacked twice, never at least fatally,” wrote Thucydides, describing the plague of Athens. He observed that recovered individuals could safely nurse the sick without falling ill themselves. And yet Twitter censored Martin Kulldorff’s tweet. “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine,” read a warning that Twitter employees put on it. For most people, the Tweet cannot be replied to, shared or liked. In other words, Twitter had decided that this professor at Harvard Medical School was wrong, and that natural immunity wasn’t really something that could protect you from COVID. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s currently our Director of the National Institutes of Health, and thus one of the highest-ranking public health officials in the world, was a Stanford epidemiologist before that. Twitter put him on a “Trends Blacklist.” Not long before we discovered this, we were told that shadow-banning was a conspiracy theory, because Twitter had said it didn’t shadow-ban. Now the European Commission is trying to censor the entire global internet. They want to put a 140 million Euro fine on X. They want to end anonymity, which was what allowed that question of Kulldorff to be asked. They want to use a “Democracy Shield” program to shield the Commission from democracy. And the Commission wants to impose “chat control” so they can read your private messages. It just gets worse and worse. Unsubstantiated and likely false claims of Russian government election interference through TikTok and social media were made in Romania and in the Czech Republic. Truth is not something that anybody holds as a possession and rather emerges through dialogue. We’ve known that since Plato and Socrates. We need free speech for science, public health, and national security. It’s essential to journalism, democracy, and human freedom. Free speech enabled civilization; censorship threatens it. This is the only political cause that I would die for. And yet there is currently an active coordination between Stanford, Brazil, Australia, and others to impose what I think we can call, without exaggeration, global totalitarianism. They’re pushing for digital identification that will end anonymity online. Why is that? Why are these guys behaving in this way? When Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 28th, 2022, unprecedented insight into multiple secret government mass censorship efforts emerged from this exploration. We had unlimited access to Twitter files. They revealed that the mainstream news reporters, who don’t deserve the name, were demanding censorship. No true journalist demands censorship of his fellow journalists. What emerged from this was an understanding of something we call the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” which directly grew out of the military industrial complex and was run by active or former intelligence community officials who often operate under that banner. It led to multiple congressional investigations and hearings, and it spread across every social media platform. So we now know the censorship that occurred, not just at Twitter, but at YouTube, at Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms. What is the Censorship Industrial Complex? The model isn’t that complicated to understand. The government chooses people whom they call “researchers” to serve as censors. These are government-funded individuals who often come from the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment. They work at non-governmental organizations funded by governments or at universities funded by governments. They conduct “fact checks” to serve as “trusted flaggers.” These “trusted flaggers” demand censorship by social media platforms. It’s all done in secret. They’re looking to censor narratives. This is essential because, as decades of good cognitive science have shown, people understand and retain information through storytelling. We think in terms of stories, not bullet points. And so they were out to censor whole narratives. From the Stanford censorship project on COVID, the “Virality Project,” they said they wanted to censor “true stories” of vaccine side effects. Why? Because it might “fuel hesitancy.” In other words, they want to control your behavior. They don’t want you to receive true information that might lead you to not get the vaccine. If that isn’t totalitarianism straight out of 1984, I don’t know what it. These people were on the verge of passing legislation in the United States that would’ve authorized the National Science Foundation to choose these “researcher” censors. I’m presenting slides to Europeans and the world for situational awareness into what totalitarian politicians and bureaucrats have planned because this is still going strong. Stanford helped the US government censor COVID dissidents, and then they lied about it. You might be detecting a pattern. They’re really not interested in censoring “misinformation.’ They’re very interested in censoring true information. The censors flagged an Israeli preprint which came out in December, 2020 and found, lo and behold, that natural immunity is a real thing. In fact, it’s more protective than the vaccine. But the censors flagged somebody’s Google Drive. “See the following Google Drive links being used to compile testimonies about vaccine shedding, Covid videos, showing side effects and whatnot.” Google then removed that content from that person’s Google Drive. You don’t control your Google Drive. Contrary to Stanford’s claim that the project did not ask social media platforms to remove any content, they privately said they did. And we know that many hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook posts were removed, even though they were a hundred percent accurate. In fact, in 2021, Stanford’s “Virality Project” flagged accurate claims that the World Health Organization did not recommend vaccinating children. The people who spread the misinformation are the people demanding the censorship. They claimed Covid couldn’t have come from a lab, that the Covid vaccine prevented infection, and that natural immunity didn’t exist. The only solution to hate speech and misinformation is free speech. If you censor false information, how would anybody get the true information? The whole point is the debate. They lied when they said false information travels faster than true information. It’s a completely bogus study and involved six seconds of content on Twitter. Who are these people? As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they called them “Bu alumni.” They created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. Intriguingly, we discovered that the general counsel of the FBI — arguably the second most powerful person of the FBI, or maybe the first, if you think, consider that what their actual job is to decide what the FBI can and can’t do — resigned from FBI in early 2020 and went to Twitter to take the deputy general counsel role. Isn’t that interesting? Somebody in one of the most powerful legal positions in the world would take a junior legal role at a social media company. Why would that be? This email popped up when we were going through Twitter files and it really jumped out at us. It’s from the director of policy at Twitter. “We have seen a sustained if uncoordinated” — supposedly — “effort by the intelligence community to push us to share more information and change our API policies. They’re probing and pushing everywhere they can.” The Hunter Biden laptop censorship occurred later that year. The FBI and the intelligence community discredited accurate, factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both before and after the New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14th, 2020. How could the FBI spread false information about something that nobody knew about? Because the FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop, which showed his family’s massive influence peddling scheme. It consisted of accepting tens of millions of dollars, including from the Chinese government. The FBI had been sitting on that laptop since December of 2019. They had been given it by the computer repair store owner, who had been given the laptop by Hunter Biden, likely because he dropped it in his bathtub or in the pool, when he was on one of his many crack and alcohol benders. The government strategy is always the same: spread disinformation first, then demand censorship of accurate information on the basis of it . “The FBI came to us in the summer of 2020,” Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan two years later, “and they were like, ‘Hey, you should be on the alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016. There’s about to be some kind of dump.’” In the summer of 2020, the New York Post had not published the story about the Hunter Biden laptop. It would only come out in October. We see something very interesting show up in the Twitter files: the Aspen Institute, an intermediary between the intelligence community and the public. It’s known as a Davos-style gab fest in the United States. It’s also the place where intelligence community operations are run. They hosted a workshop to train reporters and all of the social media’s top censorship officials, known as “trust and safety officials,” how to deal with a story they would hear in the future relating to Hunter Biden and Barisma. A few months earlier, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center had published a report attacking what we in the United States call the Pentagon Papers Principle. The Pentagon Papers Principle says that if a government official gives me, a journalist, a bunch of Pentagon documents showing that we’re losing the war in Vietnam, I, as a journalist, can publish them, and not risk prison. That was decided in a famous Supreme Court case in 1971. Stanford argued that, really, we should get rid of that principle, which may be the most important investigative journalism principle in the United States, and said, “You should cover the person who leaked the materials, not the leaked emails.” In other words, you should cover and expose the whistleblower. The person who exposed the Pentagon Papers is the real bad guy, not the DOD, CIA, and presidents who had lied to us for over a decade. Stanford was training the journalists and the social media trust and safety officers in how to cover a story that had not yet come out. This is known as “pre-bunking,” and it’s also part of the European Union strategy to shield themselves from democracy. When the Hunter Biden story appeared October 22nd, Twitter’s trust and safety censorship official said it didn’t violate its terms of service. There’s nothing illegal about any of this. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that you’re allowed to report on information that’s been leaked to you. At that moment, the former FBI general counsel, Jim Baker, argued vigorously that Twitter really needed to censor it. Baker won and they censored the story. It’s not that we didn’t hear about the Hunter Biden laptop story when it came out. I certainly did. But we had the impression that there was something wrong with it, that it was not really the whole story. And so many of us dismissed it. What they had done was a psyop on this major story. They had changed our perception of the story. And it worked. It worked on me, it worked on everybody I knew. What is the role of the intelligence community of social media companies? The former CIA people are the head of elections at Meta, and Google’s head of trust and safety. Former and current CIA officers have a history of spreading misinformation and promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory. We now know that between 2018 and 2023, there were 36 people from the CIA 68 from the FBI 44, from the National Security Administration and 68 from the Department of Homeland Security who had moved to work at the social media platforms. This is not unique to the United States. My colleague Cecilia Jilková, the daughter of famous Czech dissidents, discovered that European Union officials claimed, days before the European elections in 2024, that a “pro-Kremlin website” was spreading propaganda and were paying off European politicians. That was the headline in Politico. We wrote to them and asked, “Where’s the evidence of this? Just go ahead and share the evidence to support your accusation days before the European parliamentary elections.” Nobody was arrested. They never produced the evidence. The former Czech president, Václav Klaus, who was accused of this, said, “We don’t even know what the ‘Voice of Europe’ is.” Another Czech politician said, “How could I have known it would be a security threat? At the time I gave the interview, they weren’t on any list.” Another said, “If they’re such a big threat, why did the European Parliament let the Voice of Europe’s journalists inside?” Nobody responded. Nobody talked to us. This was a disinformation campaign carried by Politico, which, in my view, is a suspect publication. In the spring of 2022, Barack Obama went to Stanford to give a speech at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center run by Michael McFaul, his former ambassador to Russia. Obama said misinformation harms democracy and urged support for legislation in Congress that would empower government-appointed researchers to serve as “trusted flaggers.” Six days later, the Department of Homeland Security rolled out their Disinformation Governance Board. What a coincidence that they got Obama to frame the issue for them. Facebook in 2021 censored accurate vaccine information so the White House would help it to get data from Europe. In addition to removing vaccine misinformation, wrote Facebook to the White House, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation. White House said jump, and Facebook said how high? Why did they do it? Why would they voluntarily censor? This also emerged from the Facebook files. Nick Clegg on the left wrote an email to his colleagues. He said, “My sense is that given we’ve got bigger fish, we have to fry with the administration, e.g., data flows, it doesn’t seem like a great place for us to be.” Data flows. What’s he talking about? He’s talking about billions of dollars worth of business that he has to, that they would have to pay the European Commission for if they didn’t have the support from the Biden administration to lean on the European Commission. In other words, this was a shakedown by the White House of Facebook and it worked in France, the country of Liberté. Turns out it has a special role.... Please subscribe now to support Public's defense of free speech, watch the full video, and read the rest of the article!

Michael Shellenberger

174,749 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce

Kota's Hidden Nightmare: Teenage Girls Expose How Unregulated Hostels Are Flooding Aspirants with Drugs In the dusty streets of Kota, Rajasthan—India’s undisputed capital of cutthroat competitive exam coaching—hundreds of thousands of teenagers arrive every year with one dream: cracking JEE or NEET. What they often find instead is a pressure-cooker environment where sleep is a luxury, failure feels like the end of the world, and substances like ganja and cigarettes are reportedly as easy to access as a late-night chai. A hard-hitting new investigation by The Lallantop has ripped the lid off this disturbing reality. In raw, on-the-ground interviews inside coaching hostels, teenage girls—some as young as 16—have spoken openly about how drugs have become normalized in the very places meant to shelter and support them. One 16-year-old didn’t mince words: ganja, cigarettes, and more are readily available, with minimal oversight from hostel authorities or parents thousands of kilometers away. This isn’t an isolated whisper. Kota’s coaching ecosystem has long been under the scanner for student suicides (dozens reported in recent years), extreme academic stress, and now, an escalating drug menace. Private hostels and PGs—often run with little regulation—operate in a grey zone where wardens look the other way, delivery apps make everything convenient, and the all-consuming race for ranks leaves teenagers vulnerable to quick “stress-relief” fixes. The girls’ testimonies paint a chilling picture: late-night parties, open offers of weed in corridors, and a culture where saying no can feel like social suicide among peers battling the same burnout. While police have conducted occasional raids and arrested local suppliers, the problem persists because the system itself is broken—unmonitored housing, absent parental checks, and an exam industry that prioritizes results over mental health. This exposé is a wake-up call for parents, coaching institutes, regulators, and society at large. Kota produces future engineers and doctors, but at what cost? When the very hostels designed to protect these young minds become gateways to addiction, we’re not just failing our students—we’re gambling with an entire generation’s future. It’s time to demand real change: stricter hostel licensing, mandatory mental health support, on-campus counseling, random drug checks with care (not just punishment), and a national conversation that values well-being as much as ranks. Dreams shouldn’t come with a side of destruction. Parents sending kids to Kota: talk to them. Ask the tough questions. Institutes and governments: stop treating students like machines. The girls who spoke out have shown courage most adults lack. The least we can do is listen—and act—before another “Kota success story” hides a darker truth.

Kota's Hidden Nightmare: Teenage Girls Expose How Unregulated Hostels Are Flooding Aspirants with Drugs In the dusty streets of Kota, Rajasthan—India’s undisputed capital of cutthroat competitive exam coaching—hundreds of thousands of teenagers arrive every year with one dream: cracking JEE or NEET. What they often find instead is a pressure-cooker environment where sleep is a luxury, failure feels like the end of the world, and substances like ganja and cigarettes are reportedly as easy to access as a late-night chai. A hard-hitting new investigation by The Lallantop has ripped the lid off this disturbing reality. In raw, on-the-ground interviews inside coaching hostels, teenage girls—some as young as 16—have spoken openly about how drugs have become normalized in the very places meant to shelter and support them. One 16-year-old didn’t mince words: ganja, cigarettes, and more are readily available, with minimal oversight from hostel authorities or parents thousands of kilometers away. This isn’t an isolated whisper. Kota’s coaching ecosystem has long been under the scanner for student suicides (dozens reported in recent years), extreme academic stress, and now, an escalating drug menace. Private hostels and PGs—often run with little regulation—operate in a grey zone where wardens look the other way, delivery apps make everything convenient, and the all-consuming race for ranks leaves teenagers vulnerable to quick “stress-relief” fixes. The girls’ testimonies paint a chilling picture: late-night parties, open offers of weed in corridors, and a culture where saying no can feel like social suicide among peers battling the same burnout. While police have conducted occasional raids and arrested local suppliers, the problem persists because the system itself is broken—unmonitored housing, absent parental checks, and an exam industry that prioritizes results over mental health. This exposé is a wake-up call for parents, coaching institutes, regulators, and society at large. Kota produces future engineers and doctors, but at what cost? When the very hostels designed to protect these young minds become gateways to addiction, we’re not just failing our students—we’re gambling with an entire generation’s future. It’s time to demand real change: stricter hostel licensing, mandatory mental health support, on-campus counseling, random drug checks with care (not just punishment), and a national conversation that values well-being as much as ranks. Dreams shouldn’t come with a side of destruction. Parents sending kids to Kota: talk to them. Ask the tough questions. Institutes and governments: stop treating students like machines. The girls who spoke out have shown courage most adults lack. The least we can do is listen—and act—before another “Kota success story” hides a darker truth.

MOHINI WEALTH (NRI)

19,549 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce

🚨ALERT: TROJAN HORSE IN MORMON UTAH - GREAT REPLACEMENT! Somali Muslim Aden Batar Runs “Catholic” Refugee Machine Funded by LDS Tithing - Producing DSA Candidate Liban Mohamed A 27-year-old Democratic Socialist - the son of Somali immigrants who came to America, and a proud Muslim - just announced his run for Congress in what was supposed to be one of America’s reddest districts. His name is Liban Mohamed, and he is the political face of Utah’s rapidly expanding Somali Bantu Muslim community. 🚨That community did not grow by accident. 🔥 Meet Aden Batar - Somali Muslim refugee turned Director of Migration & Refugee Services at Catholic Community Services of Utah. In a 2017 video, Batar brags that he arrived as part of a huge family of 16, among the very first Somali refugees to set foot in Utah in 1994. At the airport, they were greeted by a handful of Somali students already here, plus Catholic Community Services staff rolling out the red carpet. Strangers welcomed them with open arms. Fast-forward to 2026, over 30 years later, and Batar now runs the entire program. With his deputy Khalid Al Hachami (another Muslim), he is flooding Utah with even more Muslim refugees under a Catholic label. The same welcoming system that brought his family of 16 has been turned into a pipeline that has helped grow Utah’s Somali Bantu population to roughly 10,000 strong. ⚠️But listen to Batar himself in that same talk: “As a Muslim and also working for [the Catholic] organization… every single bed that they sleep with comes from the LDS Church… As a Muslim when 9/11 happened… the first person that reached to us at our mosque was the leadership from the LDS Church… ‘We are here with you… if one religion is attacked, all religions [are] attacked.’ It gives me a lot of comfort to live in this community… I’ve never felt that I’m in the minority here.” 🚨He openly admits: ⚠️He’s a Muslim running a “Catholic” refugee machine. Every single bed for the hundreds of refugees they import comes from the LDS (Mormon) Church. ⚠️He feels completely at home in Utah because Christians bend over backward with “interfaith” support, even right after 9/11, when America was still bleeding from radical Islamic terror. Notice the sick twist: While the country reeled from 9/11, Batar paints Muslims as the real victims who needed protecting. Meanwhile, he and his network keep the doors wide open. Meanwhile, Batar also leads the Islamic Society of Greater Salt Lake. When an American/Israeli flag showed up at a local mosque last year, he issued a statement, in his official capacity at Catholic Community Services, calling it a “hate crime.” This is the Red-Green Axis in action - radical leftists and Islam working together to destroy America from within. We keep welcoming people and entire families who quickly make it their mission to import their own country, erode our culture, and remake our nation in their image. The same pattern repeated with Muslim Brotherhood-linked leaders across America whose parents first arrived on student visas and simply stayed - to destroy us from within (They now operate their main hubs out of Florida and Texas) This is the very same refugee resettlement system that welcomed Batar’s family and helped build Utah’s Somali community - the system that enabled families like Liban Mohamed’s to put down roots and now produces the next generation of DSA political candidates. Aden Batar can now sit back and celebrate the radical his life’s work has created. Utah’s famous Mormon generosity is being weaponized against the very culture that built it. Christian compassion and taxpayer dollars → imported by Muslims → run by Muslims → for more Muslims. All while the crucifix stays on the sign for cover. This isn’t charity. This is demographic conquest disguised as compassion and it’s turning the Mormon State into the next target of the Red-Green invasion. Utahns - wake up. What are we doing? And when the hell does it stop?

🚨ALERT: TROJAN HORSE IN MORMON UTAH - GREAT REPLACEMENT! Somali Muslim Aden Batar Runs “Catholic” Refugee Machine Funded by LDS Tithing - Producing DSA Candidate Liban Mohamed A 27-year-old Democratic Socialist - the son of Somali immigrants who came to America, and a proud Muslim - just announced his run for Congress in what was supposed to be one of America’s reddest districts. His name is Liban Mohamed, and he is the political face of Utah’s rapidly expanding Somali Bantu Muslim community. 🚨That community did not grow by accident. 🔥 Meet Aden Batar - Somali Muslim refugee turned Director of Migration & Refugee Services at Catholic Community Services of Utah. In a 2017 video, Batar brags that he arrived as part of a huge family of 16, among the very first Somali refugees to set foot in Utah in 1994. At the airport, they were greeted by a handful of Somali students already here, plus Catholic Community Services staff rolling out the red carpet. Strangers welcomed them with open arms. Fast-forward to 2026, over 30 years later, and Batar now runs the entire program. With his deputy Khalid Al Hachami (another Muslim), he is flooding Utah with even more Muslim refugees under a Catholic label. The same welcoming system that brought his family of 16 has been turned into a pipeline that has helped grow Utah’s Somali Bantu population to roughly 10,000 strong. ⚠️But listen to Batar himself in that same talk: “As a Muslim and also working for [the Catholic] organization… every single bed that they sleep with comes from the LDS Church… As a Muslim when 9/11 happened… the first person that reached to us at our mosque was the leadership from the LDS Church… ‘We are here with you… if one religion is attacked, all religions [are] attacked.’ It gives me a lot of comfort to live in this community… I’ve never felt that I’m in the minority here.” 🚨He openly admits: ⚠️He’s a Muslim running a “Catholic” refugee machine. Every single bed for the hundreds of refugees they import comes from the LDS (Mormon) Church. ⚠️He feels completely at home in Utah because Christians bend over backward with “interfaith” support, even right after 9/11, when America was still bleeding from radical Islamic terror. Notice the sick twist: While the country reeled from 9/11, Batar paints Muslims as the real victims who needed protecting. Meanwhile, he and his network keep the doors wide open. Meanwhile, Batar also leads the Islamic Society of Greater Salt Lake. When an American/Israeli flag showed up at a local mosque last year, he issued a statement, in his official capacity at Catholic Community Services, calling it a “hate crime.” This is the Red-Green Axis in action - radical leftists and Islam working together to destroy America from within. We keep welcoming people and entire families who quickly make it their mission to import their own country, erode our culture, and remake our nation in their image. The same pattern repeated with Muslim Brotherhood-linked leaders across America whose parents first arrived on student visas and simply stayed - to destroy us from within (They now operate their main hubs out of Florida and Texas) This is the very same refugee resettlement system that welcomed Batar’s family and helped build Utah’s Somali community - the system that enabled families like Liban Mohamed’s to put down roots and now produces the next generation of DSA political candidates. Aden Batar can now sit back and celebrate the radical his life’s work has created. Utah’s famous Mormon generosity is being weaponized against the very culture that built it. Christian compassion and taxpayer dollars → imported by Muslims → run by Muslims → for more Muslims. All while the crucifix stays on the sign for cover. This isn’t charity. This is demographic conquest disguised as compassion and it’s turning the Mormon State into the next target of the Red-Green invasion. Utahns - wake up. What are we doing? And when the hell does it stop?

Amy Mek

35,496 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce

Hard Hats for Soft Hearts For the last several years, I’ve been on a bit of a philanthropic kick. Rick Steves' Europe takes more than 30,000 people on guided tours of Europe every year, and with no stockholders in the company (other than me), I make lots of money. I’ve long passed the point where consuming more makes me happier — and rather than finding non-productive ways to blow this money on myself, I’ve become an entrepreneurial small-time philanthropist who delights in what I like to call “vicarious consumption.” (Yes, getting joy out of other people consuming my extra money.) In a society as affluent as ours with so many seniors, youth, and struggling people who can’t find or afford help, I like to “consume” by investing in things that make my community stronger, more stable, and healthier — it’s my way of “being wealthy”…and I consider this a political act. My travels in Europe have taught me that a truly great society collectively helps each other through progressive taxation and a caring government. But, with our current president, that just isn’t the way things work in the US. (I’ll be getting an obscene tax cut thanks to our president’s loyalty to the 1% at the expense of the 99%…just wait to see how — as a political statement against such regressive taxation — I’ll be “taxing myself” at an appropriate level…and putting it to good use.) About 25 years ago, I purchased some land adjacent to my church, and I was determined to find a smart way for us to put it to good use. Since then, I’ve given that land to my church, and we’ve partnered with Volunteers of America Western Washington to build a vibrant new hub of multigenerational and multicultural services that will serve thousands of people in our region — all powered by $5 million in seed money from me to help make it happen. And now, thanks to caring citizens, forward-thinking civic leaders, and generous grants from local foundations, corporations, and government programs, this $25M project is 95% paid for, and a 40,000-square-foot, LEED Gold Certified building is nearly built. This November, the Lynnwood Neighborhood Center will open its doors. Inside, our neighbors will find preschool classrooms, a Boys and Girls Club, a teen room, a multipurpose gym, adult day care for seniors with memory issues, medical and dental clinics, a behavioral health center, a teaching kitchen and café, housing and employment support, a tech center, low-cost meeting and event spaces for struggling nonprofits, and a multigenerational “piazza” where we can all come together as a community. “Vicarious consumption?” Yes, what a fun, gratifying — and these days, almost subversive — way to be wealthy. I’m so happy to help create this community hub, which is destined to give our community’s love traction long after those of us who built it are gone. While I may be the public face of this project, it couldn’t have happened without my 100 mission-driven colleagues at Rick Steves’ Europe — and travelers like you who enjoy our tours and guidebooks. I recently gave my staff a tour of the construction site, and thanks to this five-minute video, you can put on your own virtual hard hat and come along. As you join us, think about the power of neighbors coming together with the support of local businesses and caring civic leaders to turn dreams like this into joyful reality — and if, like me, you happen to have more money than you need to be happy…think of a creative way to steal this idea.

Hard Hats for Soft Hearts For the last several years, I’ve been on a bit of a philanthropic kick. Rick Steves' Europe takes more than 30,000 people on guided tours of Europe every year, and with no stockholders in the company (other than me), I make lots of money. I’ve long passed the point where consuming more makes me happier — and rather than finding non-productive ways to blow this money on myself, I’ve become an entrepreneurial small-time philanthropist who delights in what I like to call “vicarious consumption.” (Yes, getting joy out of other people consuming my extra money.) In a society as affluent as ours with so many seniors, youth, and struggling people who can’t find or afford help, I like to “consume” by investing in things that make my community stronger, more stable, and healthier — it’s my way of “being wealthy”…and I consider this a political act. My travels in Europe have taught me that a truly great society collectively helps each other through progressive taxation and a caring government. But, with our current president, that just isn’t the way things work in the US. (I’ll be getting an obscene tax cut thanks to our president’s loyalty to the 1% at the expense of the 99%…just wait to see how — as a political statement against such regressive taxation — I’ll be “taxing myself” at an appropriate level…and putting it to good use.) About 25 years ago, I purchased some land adjacent to my church, and I was determined to find a smart way for us to put it to good use. Since then, I’ve given that land to my church, and we’ve partnered with Volunteers of America Western Washington to build a vibrant new hub of multigenerational and multicultural services that will serve thousands of people in our region — all powered by $5 million in seed money from me to help make it happen. And now, thanks to caring citizens, forward-thinking civic leaders, and generous grants from local foundations, corporations, and government programs, this $25M project is 95% paid for, and a 40,000-square-foot, LEED Gold Certified building is nearly built. This November, the Lynnwood Neighborhood Center will open its doors. Inside, our neighbors will find preschool classrooms, a Boys and Girls Club, a teen room, a multipurpose gym, adult day care for seniors with memory issues, medical and dental clinics, a behavioral health center, a teaching kitchen and café, housing and employment support, a tech center, low-cost meeting and event spaces for struggling nonprofits, and a multigenerational “piazza” where we can all come together as a community. “Vicarious consumption?” Yes, what a fun, gratifying — and these days, almost subversive — way to be wealthy. I’m so happy to help create this community hub, which is destined to give our community’s love traction long after those of us who built it are gone. While I may be the public face of this project, it couldn’t have happened without my 100 mission-driven colleagues at Rick Steves’ Europe — and travelers like you who enjoy our tours and guidebooks. I recently gave my staff a tour of the construction site, and thanks to this five-minute video, you can put on your own virtual hard hat and come along. As you join us, think about the power of neighbors coming together with the support of local businesses and caring civic leaders to turn dreams like this into joyful reality — and if, like me, you happen to have more money than you need to be happy…think of a creative way to steal this idea.

Rick Steves

70,941 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce

In 2001, when MTV’s "Cribs" cameras arrived at Redman’s Staten Island duplex, the world expected the usual parade of marble foyers, infinity pools, and garages stuffed with exotic cars‼️. Instead, they got “De La Casa”—a modest two-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse that looked lived-in, cluttered, and completely unapologetic‼️. Redman, born Reginald “Reggie” Noble, was already a hip-hop veteran known for his dense, humorous lyricism and Funk Doctor Spock persona‼️. The network approached him like many other artists of the era: they had a couple of nicer houses lined up for him to tour, the kind with grand double doors that would let a star open them theatrically and declare ownership of the good life‼️. Redman declined‼️. He later explained that his mother would have immediately called him out for pretending a rented mansion was his‼️. So he invited the crew to the actual place he called home‼️. The production team showed up early one morning, earlier than expected‼️. Redman was still in bed‼️. His cousin—known as Sugar Bear or Mr. Cream was passed out on the floor in a sleeping bag‼️. The doorbell was two exposed wires hanging from a hole; visitors had to touch them together to make a sound‼️. The screen door had no screen‼️. When the small crew (pared down because the space could not hold more) stepped inside, they found themselves in a real working musician’s apartment rather than a staged showcase‼️. Redman gave the tour with the same deadpan energy he brought to his records‼️. The bedroom became “Exhibit A”: clothes piled in plastic bins and corners, empty food containers, a collection of adult movies he casually described as being for “the freaks,” and hangers that stood in for a proper wardrobe‼️. He ironed clothes on the floor‼️. His “walk-in closet” was barely big enough to step into and back out of‼️. The bathroom held an assortment of body washes‼️Herbal Essences among them‼️that he presented with pride‼️. Downstairs sat a home studio with records scattered across the floor and bare walls. Gold plaques mixed with laundry‼️. In the kitchen, a George Foreman grill waited near frozen fish fillets he liked to cook‼️. On top of the refrigerator sat the famous “dollar box,” a plain shoebox stuffed with crumpled bills‼️. “If I need some money,” he told the camera, “I just run to the dollar box and go get me some bread, or some juice.” He recommended everyone keep one‼️. He never apologized for any of it‼️💯. “This is what an apartment look like when a brother doing his album,” he said, “or he ain’t run off to the hills and buy a big crib away from the hood‼️. This apartment is right in the hood, and it’s nice.”‼️ The episode ends with him in the doorway, inviting the cameras back and yelling for them to bring something to eat next time‼️. Viewers were stunned‼️. In an era when "Cribs" specialized in aspirational excess‼️ and when some guests quietly rented properties or cars to inflate the image‼️Redman’s episode felt like a glitch in the matrix‼️. Some people assumed it was a prank or a hoax‼️. It was neither‼️. The producers later confirmed everything was authentic‼️. The crew had even held a quick outdoor meeting after walking in, processing the unexpected reality of the space‼️. The episode became one of the most talked-about and highest-rated installments of the series, remembered long after the marble and crystal faded from memory‼️. Redman’s decision was deliberate‼️. He wanted fans to see that not every working artist lived like a cartoon of wealth‼️. Many were doing fine without the spectacle‼️. The unfiltered tour cemented his reputation for keeping it real in a culture that often rewarded performance‼️. Years later he still lived in the same Staten Island house (by then nicknamed “De La Castle”), having made only modest upgrades‼️. The dollar box had evolved into a sock in one retelling, the television got bigger, a closet door appeared, but the spirit remained the same‼️💯.

In 2001, when MTV’s "Cribs" cameras arrived at Redman’s Staten Island duplex, the world expected the usual parade of marble foyers, infinity pools, and garages stuffed with exotic cars‼️. Instead, they got “De La Casa”—a modest two-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse that looked lived-in, cluttered, and completely unapologetic‼️. Redman, born Reginald “Reggie” Noble, was already a hip-hop veteran known for his dense, humorous lyricism and Funk Doctor Spock persona‼️. The network approached him like many other artists of the era: they had a couple of nicer houses lined up for him to tour, the kind with grand double doors that would let a star open them theatrically and declare ownership of the good life‼️. Redman declined‼️. He later explained that his mother would have immediately called him out for pretending a rented mansion was his‼️. So he invited the crew to the actual place he called home‼️. The production team showed up early one morning, earlier than expected‼️. Redman was still in bed‼️. His cousin—known as Sugar Bear or Mr. Cream was passed out on the floor in a sleeping bag‼️. The doorbell was two exposed wires hanging from a hole; visitors had to touch them together to make a sound‼️. The screen door had no screen‼️. When the small crew (pared down because the space could not hold more) stepped inside, they found themselves in a real working musician’s apartment rather than a staged showcase‼️. Redman gave the tour with the same deadpan energy he brought to his records‼️. The bedroom became “Exhibit A”: clothes piled in plastic bins and corners, empty food containers, a collection of adult movies he casually described as being for “the freaks,” and hangers that stood in for a proper wardrobe‼️. He ironed clothes on the floor‼️. His “walk-in closet” was barely big enough to step into and back out of‼️. The bathroom held an assortment of body washes‼️Herbal Essences among them‼️that he presented with pride‼️. Downstairs sat a home studio with records scattered across the floor and bare walls. Gold plaques mixed with laundry‼️. In the kitchen, a George Foreman grill waited near frozen fish fillets he liked to cook‼️. On top of the refrigerator sat the famous “dollar box,” a plain shoebox stuffed with crumpled bills‼️. “If I need some money,” he told the camera, “I just run to the dollar box and go get me some bread, or some juice.” He recommended everyone keep one‼️. He never apologized for any of it‼️💯. “This is what an apartment look like when a brother doing his album,” he said, “or he ain’t run off to the hills and buy a big crib away from the hood‼️. This apartment is right in the hood, and it’s nice.”‼️ The episode ends with him in the doorway, inviting the cameras back and yelling for them to bring something to eat next time‼️. Viewers were stunned‼️. In an era when "Cribs" specialized in aspirational excess‼️ and when some guests quietly rented properties or cars to inflate the image‼️Redman’s episode felt like a glitch in the matrix‼️. Some people assumed it was a prank or a hoax‼️. It was neither‼️. The producers later confirmed everything was authentic‼️. The crew had even held a quick outdoor meeting after walking in, processing the unexpected reality of the space‼️. The episode became one of the most talked-about and highest-rated installments of the series, remembered long after the marble and crystal faded from memory‼️. Redman’s decision was deliberate‼️. He wanted fans to see that not every working artist lived like a cartoon of wealth‼️. Many were doing fine without the spectacle‼️. The unfiltered tour cemented his reputation for keeping it real in a culture that often rewarded performance‼️. Years later he still lived in the same Staten Island house (by then nicknamed “De La Castle”), having made only modest upgrades‼️. The dollar box had evolved into a sock in one retelling, the television got bigger, a closet door appeared, but the spirit remained the same‼️💯.

(st_ides)

66,851 görüntüleme • 22 gün önce

Communist and socialist groups call for 'revolution' and seizure of property at Minneapolis May Day rally | Michael Dorgan, Fox News Communist and socialist groups called for a "revolution" at a May Day rally in Minneapolis Friday, highlighting the growing influence of far-left organizations at an event traditionally centered on workers’ rights. Some of those demonstrators denounced capitalism and pushed for the seizure of private property and the means of production, marking a shift in tone from past May Day rallies that primarily focused on labor issues. Protesters on the ground outlined a range of demands, including rent caps tied to income, a reduced work week and the redistribution of wealth from billionaires. The rally, which drew well over 1,000 people, was organized as an immigrant rights demonstration but brought together a broad mix of labor unions, activist organizations and far-left political groups marching side by side. Among the groups present were the Communist Party USA, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), with numerous participants carrying flags and signage featuring socialist imagery like the hammer and sickle. Members of the Communist Party USA were seen handing out newspapers and leaflets, including a publication titled The Communist with the headline "Down with Trump’s War!" Demonstrators carried signs reading "F--k ICE," "Abolish ICE," "Fight Trump’s Agenda," "No Kings" and "Stop the War," while others waved red flags associated with the Communist Party USA and held banners featuring the hammer and sickle, including signage from the Revolutionary Communists of America. A Fox News Digital investigation previously identified U.S.-born tech entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham, who lives in China, as a key figure in a network tied to some far-left groups involved in protests, part of a broader mobilization involving roughly 600 organizations nationwide. But demonstrators interviewed in Minneapolis said they were largely unaware of him or dismissed concerns about funding. Andy Koch, a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, told Fox News Digital the U.S. is "run by billionaires" and should instead be run by working people. He said support from a a wealthy donor would be acceptable if it advanced the cause. "If one billionaire… wants to donate to progressive pro-worker causes, that’s great," Koch said. When asked for examples of successful socialist systems, Koch pointed to China, saying "China’s doing pretty good right now," and praised the former Soviet Union for having "done a lot for its people. Members of the Revolutionary Communists of America were also present, with one protester saying he was "radicalized" in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. "We’re calling for down with Trump and down with the Democrats," the protester said. Demonstrations in Minneapolis come months after large-scale anti-ICE protests with Friday’s May Day events reflecting similar themes tied to immigration enforcement and broader economic concerns. The march was organized as an immigrant rights demonstration, promoted under the slogan "Immigrants Rise! Workers Unite!" and led by groups including the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC). A speaker with MIRAC led chants of "No one is illegal" and "All power to the people," with large sections of the crowd repeating the slogans. The event began with organizers and speakers affiliated with the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) leading chants and addressing the crowd from a makeshift stage, while dancers in indigenous regalia were also present. Socialist and communist groups initially gathered toward the back of the crowd but later joined the march, falling in line behind the immigrant rights organizers as demonstrators moved through the city. A significant contingent of socialist and communist groups marched alongside the organizers, underscoring the ideological overlap at the event. Flags throughout the march reflected a wide mix of causes and affiliations, including Palestinian flags, LGBTQ pride imagery and banners associated with socialist and communist groups. High-visibility marshals affiliated with protest groups directed the march and blocked side streets, with little to no visible police presence along much of the route. Another protester who identified as a communist said the current system is a "dead end" and argued that "the workers create all the value in society and we get to own none of it under capitalism." She said the group supports policies including rent caps tied to income and limiting rent to 10% of wages. When asked about rent-control policies in cities like New York and California, where such measures have faced criticism, one woman said those efforts failed because they were not "under workers' control." "Under capitalism, it won't work. We need a society under control of the workers," she said. Owen Phernetton, a member of the Revolutionary Communists of America, said the group is "building a party of class fighters" and argued that "we need a revolution… on a socialist basis." He said the organization supports seizing property, including factories, mines and office spaces and placing them under the ownership of the working class. "We argue for decreasing the workday to only 20 hours a week without any loss in pay," he said. He added that billionaire wealth should be "expropriated and put in use for the working class," pointing to the Soviet Union as an example. Several Minneapolis City Council members, most affiliated with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), attended the rally and read out a non-binding resolution recognizing May 1 as International Workers Day. During the remarks, one speaker told the crowd "we must abolish ICE," linking labor issues with immigration policy. Jason Chavez read parts of the resolution alongside fellow council members Elliott Payne, Aurin Chowdhury, Soren Stevenson and Jamal Osman. Council member Robin Wonsley was also present. Not all observers supported the messaging. Sedonia Meyers, who said she was watching from the sidewalk, described herself as "a very centrist individual" and said immigration should follow a legal process. "If you want to be a citizen… you should work hard… and do the proper steps," she said, adding that the U.S. must "vet the people that come into this country" to ensure public safety. Two other elderly women observing nearby welcomed the presence of communist and socialist groups, describing the rally as a "big tent," and inisting that there was "room for everyone," though they did not support calls to abolish ICE. The protest concluded without major disruption, with demonstrators marching through the city in largely good spirits. A marching band played upbeat music as participants moved along the route, though speakers delivered more forceful rhetoric as they outlined their demands. Earlier in the day, smaller gatherings drew limited turnout, including a union-led rally at Government Plaza that a union leader described a union gathering with "no connection to broader protests."

Communist and socialist groups call for 'revolution' and seizure of property at Minneapolis May Day rally | Michael Dorgan, Fox News Communist and socialist groups called for a "revolution" at a May Day rally in Minneapolis Friday, highlighting the growing influence of far-left organizations at an event traditionally centered on workers’ rights. Some of those demonstrators denounced capitalism and pushed for the seizure of private property and the means of production, marking a shift in tone from past May Day rallies that primarily focused on labor issues. Protesters on the ground outlined a range of demands, including rent caps tied to income, a reduced work week and the redistribution of wealth from billionaires. The rally, which drew well over 1,000 people, was organized as an immigrant rights demonstration but brought together a broad mix of labor unions, activist organizations and far-left political groups marching side by side. Among the groups present were the Communist Party USA, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), with numerous participants carrying flags and signage featuring socialist imagery like the hammer and sickle. Members of the Communist Party USA were seen handing out newspapers and leaflets, including a publication titled The Communist with the headline "Down with Trump’s War!" Demonstrators carried signs reading "F--k ICE," "Abolish ICE," "Fight Trump’s Agenda," "No Kings" and "Stop the War," while others waved red flags associated with the Communist Party USA and held banners featuring the hammer and sickle, including signage from the Revolutionary Communists of America. A Fox News Digital investigation previously identified U.S.-born tech entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham, who lives in China, as a key figure in a network tied to some far-left groups involved in protests, part of a broader mobilization involving roughly 600 organizations nationwide. But demonstrators interviewed in Minneapolis said they were largely unaware of him or dismissed concerns about funding. Andy Koch, a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, told Fox News Digital the U.S. is "run by billionaires" and should instead be run by working people. He said support from a a wealthy donor would be acceptable if it advanced the cause. "If one billionaire… wants to donate to progressive pro-worker causes, that’s great," Koch said. When asked for examples of successful socialist systems, Koch pointed to China, saying "China’s doing pretty good right now," and praised the former Soviet Union for having "done a lot for its people. Members of the Revolutionary Communists of America were also present, with one protester saying he was "radicalized" in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. "We’re calling for down with Trump and down with the Democrats," the protester said. Demonstrations in Minneapolis come months after large-scale anti-ICE protests with Friday’s May Day events reflecting similar themes tied to immigration enforcement and broader economic concerns. The march was organized as an immigrant rights demonstration, promoted under the slogan "Immigrants Rise! Workers Unite!" and led by groups including the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC). A speaker with MIRAC led chants of "No one is illegal" and "All power to the people," with large sections of the crowd repeating the slogans. The event began with organizers and speakers affiliated with the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) leading chants and addressing the crowd from a makeshift stage, while dancers in indigenous regalia were also present. Socialist and communist groups initially gathered toward the back of the crowd but later joined the march, falling in line behind the immigrant rights organizers as demonstrators moved through the city. A significant contingent of socialist and communist groups marched alongside the organizers, underscoring the ideological overlap at the event. Flags throughout the march reflected a wide mix of causes and affiliations, including Palestinian flags, LGBTQ pride imagery and banners associated with socialist and communist groups. High-visibility marshals affiliated with protest groups directed the march and blocked side streets, with little to no visible police presence along much of the route. Another protester who identified as a communist said the current system is a "dead end" and argued that "the workers create all the value in society and we get to own none of it under capitalism." She said the group supports policies including rent caps tied to income and limiting rent to 10% of wages. When asked about rent-control policies in cities like New York and California, where such measures have faced criticism, one woman said those efforts failed because they were not "under workers' control." "Under capitalism, it won't work. We need a society under control of the workers," she said. Owen Phernetton, a member of the Revolutionary Communists of America, said the group is "building a party of class fighters" and argued that "we need a revolution… on a socialist basis." He said the organization supports seizing property, including factories, mines and office spaces and placing them under the ownership of the working class. "We argue for decreasing the workday to only 20 hours a week without any loss in pay," he said. He added that billionaire wealth should be "expropriated and put in use for the working class," pointing to the Soviet Union as an example. Several Minneapolis City Council members, most affiliated with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), attended the rally and read out a non-binding resolution recognizing May 1 as International Workers Day. During the remarks, one speaker told the crowd "we must abolish ICE," linking labor issues with immigration policy. Jason Chavez read parts of the resolution alongside fellow council members Elliott Payne, Aurin Chowdhury, Soren Stevenson and Jamal Osman. Council member Robin Wonsley was also present. Not all observers supported the messaging. Sedonia Meyers, who said she was watching from the sidewalk, described herself as "a very centrist individual" and said immigration should follow a legal process. "If you want to be a citizen… you should work hard… and do the proper steps," she said, adding that the U.S. must "vet the people that come into this country" to ensure public safety. Two other elderly women observing nearby welcomed the presence of communist and socialist groups, describing the rally as a "big tent," and inisting that there was "room for everyone," though they did not support calls to abolish ICE. The protest concluded without major disruption, with demonstrators marching through the city in largely good spirits. A marching band played upbeat music as participants moved along the route, though speakers delivered more forceful rhetoric as they outlined their demands. Earlier in the day, smaller gatherings drew limited turnout, including a union-led rally at Government Plaza that a union leader described a union gathering with "no connection to broader protests."

Owen Gregorian

10,816 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce

The Circus Is the Signal: What William Cooper Saw Before Everyone Else William Cooper is one of those figures who doesn’t fit into a neat box. He served in Naval intelligence, hosted late night broadcasts, and ultimately wrote Behold a Pale Horse, a book that became an underground classic long before the internet amplified voices like his. For decades it’s been one of the most requested and most circulated non religious books in the U.S. prison system, sitting next to the Bible, Malcolm X, and 48 Laws of Power. That alone says something. Prison libraries aren’t filled with trend chasing readers; they’re filled with people trying to understand systems of power, manipulation, control. When thousands of inmates reach for the same book year after year, it’s because it’s touching something they instinctively recognize. Cooper’s book is sprawling and controversial. Some claims are unverifiable, some documents questionable, some conclusions dramatic. But the reason the book survives, the reason it keeps passing from hand to hand is because Cooper captures something people feel but rarely articulate…the sense that the official story is almost never the real story, and that powerful institutions shape what the public pays attention to. That’s the same energy in this clip. Cooper is talking about the operating logic of empire. When a society becomes unstable…politically, economically, spiritually the people running it don’t solve the rot. They manage perception. Rome had its bread and circuses. We have billion dollar stadiums, celebrity athletes, sports networks, betting apps, endless controversy cycles. Keep people emotionally invested in games and rivalries, and they have less energy to question who’s steering the system or where the money goes. For Cooper, entertainment isn’t just entertainment, it’s strategy. Spectacle becomes a pressure valve. It absorbs public frustration, keeps people distracted, prevents them from asking harder questions about war, debt, corruption, surveillance, or the financial plumbing that determines who thrives and who never gets a chance. In Rome, the circus wasn’t just a show; it was a governance tool. Cooper’s argument is that modern culture runs on a more sophisticated version of the same template. This is why his work still hits a nerve. You don’t have to believe every claim in Behold a Pale Horse to feel the weight of the pattern he’s describing. He warned about surveillance long before digital tracking became normal. He warned about manufactured crises before crisis driven governance became a daily reality. He warned about media distraction before social feeds turned into a constant dopamine drip. The specifics may be debatable, but the direction of the trend has aged with uncomfortable accuracy. And that’s why this clip feels so relevant now. We live in a moment where global systems are strained, governments are buried in debt, conflicts are spreading, and ordinary people feel like something is off even if they can’t name it. And whenever societies reach that point, the distractions grow louder and more immersive. The circus expands. Cooper’s point wasn’t that sports are bad. It was that the biggest shows in a declining society usually serve a purpose. They fill the mental space where awareness and skepticism used to live. They keep people entertained while deeper decisions happen out of sight. That’s why Behold a Pale Horse still circulates so widely in the places society ignores. People who’ve been crushed by the system often see its architecture more clearly than the people still mesmerized by the spectacle. You don’t read Cooper for comfort. You read him because he forces you to look past the circus and toward whatever the circus is meant to hide.

The Circus Is the Signal: What William Cooper Saw Before Everyone Else William Cooper is one of those figures who doesn’t fit into a neat box. He served in Naval intelligence, hosted late night broadcasts, and ultimately wrote Behold a Pale Horse, a book that became an underground classic long before the internet amplified voices like his. For decades it’s been one of the most requested and most circulated non religious books in the U.S. prison system, sitting next to the Bible, Malcolm X, and 48 Laws of Power. That alone says something. Prison libraries aren’t filled with trend chasing readers; they’re filled with people trying to understand systems of power, manipulation, control. When thousands of inmates reach for the same book year after year, it’s because it’s touching something they instinctively recognize. Cooper’s book is sprawling and controversial. Some claims are unverifiable, some documents questionable, some conclusions dramatic. But the reason the book survives, the reason it keeps passing from hand to hand is because Cooper captures something people feel but rarely articulate…the sense that the official story is almost never the real story, and that powerful institutions shape what the public pays attention to. That’s the same energy in this clip. Cooper is talking about the operating logic of empire. When a society becomes unstable…politically, economically, spiritually the people running it don’t solve the rot. They manage perception. Rome had its bread and circuses. We have billion dollar stadiums, celebrity athletes, sports networks, betting apps, endless controversy cycles. Keep people emotionally invested in games and rivalries, and they have less energy to question who’s steering the system or where the money goes. For Cooper, entertainment isn’t just entertainment, it’s strategy. Spectacle becomes a pressure valve. It absorbs public frustration, keeps people distracted, prevents them from asking harder questions about war, debt, corruption, surveillance, or the financial plumbing that determines who thrives and who never gets a chance. In Rome, the circus wasn’t just a show; it was a governance tool. Cooper’s argument is that modern culture runs on a more sophisticated version of the same template. This is why his work still hits a nerve. You don’t have to believe every claim in Behold a Pale Horse to feel the weight of the pattern he’s describing. He warned about surveillance long before digital tracking became normal. He warned about manufactured crises before crisis driven governance became a daily reality. He warned about media distraction before social feeds turned into a constant dopamine drip. The specifics may be debatable, but the direction of the trend has aged with uncomfortable accuracy. And that’s why this clip feels so relevant now. We live in a moment where global systems are strained, governments are buried in debt, conflicts are spreading, and ordinary people feel like something is off even if they can’t name it. And whenever societies reach that point, the distractions grow louder and more immersive. The circus expands. Cooper’s point wasn’t that sports are bad. It was that the biggest shows in a declining society usually serve a purpose. They fill the mental space where awareness and skepticism used to live. They keep people entertained while deeper decisions happen out of sight. That’s why Behold a Pale Horse still circulates so widely in the places society ignores. People who’ve been crushed by the system often see its architecture more clearly than the people still mesmerized by the spectacle. You don’t read Cooper for comfort. You read him because he forces you to look past the circus and toward whatever the circus is meant to hide.

EndGame Macro

107,629 görüntüleme • 9 ay önce

Baroness Warsi Claims Campaigning Against The Pakistani Rape Gangs is Racism, Bigotry and Fascism. She is Wrong. Once again, a leading Pakistani Muslim politician has reached for the same tired euphemism used for nearly three decades to blur the truth and shield those responsible. “I think the quicker we move to a position where individuals are judged by their individual characteristics, and the actions of bad people within groups are not superimposed onto entire communities and used as a tool to demonise them, the better. Otherwise we effectively single those communities out as targets for racism and abuse.” Baroness Warsi's interview is a calculated act of moral evasion. The same denial that allowed these crimes to flourish in the first place is now being used to deflect from a simple truth. The industrial scale gang rape of little White girls are not the actions of individuals. They are the consequences of a cultural belief that is deeply embedded in a community. The refusal to acknowledge this is part of a long tradition in Britain of avoiding hard conversations about the communities we imported and the ideologies they carried with them. Successive governments, terrified of upsetting a fragile multicultural consensus, have chosen denial over honesty. To this day, they continue to bury the truth beneath polite language and bureaucratic vagueness, creating the conditions in which this poison has taken root and continues growing unchecked. The Pakistanis who arrived in Britain in large numbers during the 1950s and 1960s did not come as ideologically neutral migrants. They brought with them a worldview forged in the fires of rape, genocide, and ethnic cleansing that underpinned the brutal birth of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. For decades, that worldview was reinforced by the Pakistani government's propaganda promoting the belief that Islam’s survival depended on separation, control, and purity. In Britain, this ideology went unchallenged. And so, here, it festered. To understand the rape gangs and the industrial scale sexual exploitation of this nation’s children, we must confront the deep rooted racial and religious prejudices embedded within these communities. These Men Did Not Emerge From a Vacuum They were shaped by a culture that long ago learned to rationalise violence against those deemed inferior or impure. Only then can we see that what is happening in Britain today is not a cultural aberration, but a continuation, a modern echo of what their fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers once did in Pakistan. The same doctrine that justified the slaughter and rape of Hindus, Sikhs and Bengalis during Partition has found new expression in Britain. What had once been political has become social. What was once a war between nations has become a war for dominance within neighbourhoods. The ideology that sanctified conquest and control now justifies the exploitation of White girls who, in their worldview, are seen as morally corrupt, religiously impure and therefore sexually available. These Are Not The Actions of Individuals It is behaviour rooted in cultural conditioning that is sustained by collective acceptance. Within these communities, the subjugation of women, the authority of elders and the policing of behaviour are not extremes. They are norms. This theology of social power, where men rule women, elders rule youth and sects rule one another, has created a world in which silence and submission are expected. It was within that silence, and under the cover of communal respectability, that the rape gangs are able to thrive. This is why a judge summing up the latest convictions in Rochdale raised concerns of how they all knew. And they all did nothing. The rape gangs themselves reflect this same social architecture. They operate along clan lines, often involving brothers, cousins, uncles, and family friends who protected one another through blood loyalty and communal silence. These are not isolated predators but organised networks bound by kinship, secrecy, and a shared contempt for the girls they targeted. When this ideology metastasised into organised sexual exploitation of working class White girls, Britain’s institutions looked away. Police officers, councillors and social workers, many of them knowing full well what was happening, chose silence over truth. Fear of being called racist became more powerful than the duty to protect a child. The result was moral paralysis, an entire generation of girls sacrificed to maintain a comforting illusion of community cohesion. Behind This Silence Stands Another Motive Political survival. In many towns and cities, Labour councillors rely on tightly controlled bloc votes from Pakistani communities to keep power. These votes are delivered through local power-brokers, elders and mosque committees who demand loyalty in return for turnout. The price of that loyalty is silence. Politicians know that confronting the rape gangs means confronting the same networks that deliver their majorities. So they look the other way, protected their careers, and branded truth-tellers as racists and troublemakers. The state, terrified of offending a vocal minority and addicted to the arithmetic of bloc politics, allows the language of diversity to become the armour of depravity. What began as political cowardice has since hardened into cultural orthodoxy The same fear that once silenced whistleblowers now shapes our national conversation. Those who protected their bloc votes in the town halls now protect their reputations in Westminster, the media and academia. Instead of reckoning with what happened, they have rewritten the narrative, shifting blame, censoring debate, and recasting moral cowardice as tolerance. This double standard runs deep. The same institutions that silenced victims and ignored predators now lecture the rest of us on morality. The Lesson is Clear In modern Britain, moral outrage is permitted only when it is politically convenient. The same nation that now claims to confront Islamophobia still cannot speak the truth about who is raping its children. _________ I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry. You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back. I document everything in my newsletter. It’s 100% free to read. If this work matters to you, if you believe it must continue, I need your backing. My work is free. No paywalls. No gatekeeping. No exclusions. Because the truth shouldn’t belong only to those who can afford it. If you can afford to do so, supporting me costs as little as 75p a week (£30 a year). Sign up here; 👉 If you can’t commit to a regular subscription, a one-off contribution genuinely helps keep this alive. You can support me using one of these links; 👉 👉 We’re up against a machine, politicians, police, officials, and media, working together to shrink, sanitise, and bury the truth. This work survives because of you. If you’ve ever shared my posts, learned something, or felt less alone reading them, stand with me. I need your help. Raja 🙏

Baroness Warsi Claims Campaigning Against The Pakistani Rape Gangs is Racism, Bigotry and Fascism. She is Wrong. Once again, a leading Pakistani Muslim politician has reached for the same tired euphemism used for nearly three decades to blur the truth and shield those responsible. “I think the quicker we move to a position where individuals are judged by their individual characteristics, and the actions of bad people within groups are not superimposed onto entire communities and used as a tool to demonise them, the better. Otherwise we effectively single those communities out as targets for racism and abuse.” Baroness Warsi's interview is a calculated act of moral evasion. The same denial that allowed these crimes to flourish in the first place is now being used to deflect from a simple truth. The industrial scale gang rape of little White girls are not the actions of individuals. They are the consequences of a cultural belief that is deeply embedded in a community. The refusal to acknowledge this is part of a long tradition in Britain of avoiding hard conversations about the communities we imported and the ideologies they carried with them. Successive governments, terrified of upsetting a fragile multicultural consensus, have chosen denial over honesty. To this day, they continue to bury the truth beneath polite language and bureaucratic vagueness, creating the conditions in which this poison has taken root and continues growing unchecked. The Pakistanis who arrived in Britain in large numbers during the 1950s and 1960s did not come as ideologically neutral migrants. They brought with them a worldview forged in the fires of rape, genocide, and ethnic cleansing that underpinned the brutal birth of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. For decades, that worldview was reinforced by the Pakistani government's propaganda promoting the belief that Islam’s survival depended on separation, control, and purity. In Britain, this ideology went unchallenged. And so, here, it festered. To understand the rape gangs and the industrial scale sexual exploitation of this nation’s children, we must confront the deep rooted racial and religious prejudices embedded within these communities. These Men Did Not Emerge From a Vacuum They were shaped by a culture that long ago learned to rationalise violence against those deemed inferior or impure. Only then can we see that what is happening in Britain today is not a cultural aberration, but a continuation, a modern echo of what their fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers once did in Pakistan. The same doctrine that justified the slaughter and rape of Hindus, Sikhs and Bengalis during Partition has found new expression in Britain. What had once been political has become social. What was once a war between nations has become a war for dominance within neighbourhoods. The ideology that sanctified conquest and control now justifies the exploitation of White girls who, in their worldview, are seen as morally corrupt, religiously impure and therefore sexually available. These Are Not The Actions of Individuals It is behaviour rooted in cultural conditioning that is sustained by collective acceptance. Within these communities, the subjugation of women, the authority of elders and the policing of behaviour are not extremes. They are norms. This theology of social power, where men rule women, elders rule youth and sects rule one another, has created a world in which silence and submission are expected. It was within that silence, and under the cover of communal respectability, that the rape gangs are able to thrive. This is why a judge summing up the latest convictions in Rochdale raised concerns of how they all knew. And they all did nothing. The rape gangs themselves reflect this same social architecture. They operate along clan lines, often involving brothers, cousins, uncles, and family friends who protected one another through blood loyalty and communal silence. These are not isolated predators but organised networks bound by kinship, secrecy, and a shared contempt for the girls they targeted. When this ideology metastasised into organised sexual exploitation of working class White girls, Britain’s institutions looked away. Police officers, councillors and social workers, many of them knowing full well what was happening, chose silence over truth. Fear of being called racist became more powerful than the duty to protect a child. The result was moral paralysis, an entire generation of girls sacrificed to maintain a comforting illusion of community cohesion. Behind This Silence Stands Another Motive Political survival. In many towns and cities, Labour councillors rely on tightly controlled bloc votes from Pakistani communities to keep power. These votes are delivered through local power-brokers, elders and mosque committees who demand loyalty in return for turnout. The price of that loyalty is silence. Politicians know that confronting the rape gangs means confronting the same networks that deliver their majorities. So they look the other way, protected their careers, and branded truth-tellers as racists and troublemakers. The state, terrified of offending a vocal minority and addicted to the arithmetic of bloc politics, allows the language of diversity to become the armour of depravity. What began as political cowardice has since hardened into cultural orthodoxy The same fear that once silenced whistleblowers now shapes our national conversation. Those who protected their bloc votes in the town halls now protect their reputations in Westminster, the media and academia. Instead of reckoning with what happened, they have rewritten the narrative, shifting blame, censoring debate, and recasting moral cowardice as tolerance. This double standard runs deep. The same institutions that silenced victims and ignored predators now lecture the rest of us on morality. The Lesson is Clear In modern Britain, moral outrage is permitted only when it is politically convenient. The same nation that now claims to confront Islamophobia still cannot speak the truth about who is raping its children. _________ I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry. You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back. I document everything in my newsletter. It’s 100% free to read. If this work matters to you, if you believe it must continue, I need your backing. My work is free. No paywalls. No gatekeeping. No exclusions. Because the truth shouldn’t belong only to those who can afford it. If you can afford to do so, supporting me costs as little as 75p a week (£30 a year). Sign up here; 👉 If you can’t commit to a regular subscription, a one-off contribution genuinely helps keep this alive. You can support me using one of these links; 👉 👉 We’re up against a machine, politicians, police, officials, and media, working together to shrink, sanitise, and bury the truth. This work survives because of you. If you’ve ever shared my posts, learned something, or felt less alone reading them, stand with me. I need your help. Raja 🙏

Raja Miah

15,774 görüntüleme • 6 ay önce

Summer Holiday Photos Place the UAE-Backed Rapid Support Militia Leader in the Emirates as Atrocities Continue Across Sudan A series of photographs circulated on Sudanese social media this month that, at first glance, appeared entirely ordinary. A spacious courtyard at dusk, a customised Mercedes parked on a quiet street, and an older man sitting on a pale sofa with a child on his lap. They could easily have been photographs from any family summer holiday, far removed from the war, famine and mass graves that have come to define Sudan’s landscape. The older man in the photographs, however, is Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, commander of the UAE-backed Rapid Support Militia, the paramilitary force commonly associated with the Janjaweed. In January 2025, the United States sanctioned Hemedti by name as it formally determined that members of the Rapid Support Militia and allied militias had committed genocide in Darfur. The decision came after nearly two years of war in which atrocities attributed to the militia had spread across large parts of Sudan. In El Geneina, Human Rights Watch documented an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Masalit that included mass killings, rape, looting and forced displacement, among the most horrific episodes of violence since the war began. In Khartoum, the militia controlled large areas of the capital for months. Civilian homes and buildings were turned into military positions and detention facilities. As the Sudanese army advanced and retook areas previously held by the militia, detention sites, graves and bodies began to emerge, alongside testimony from survivors describing torture, starvation, humiliation and detention in brutal conditions. The period of militia control over large parts of Khartoum, Omdurman and Bahri was also marked by widespread looting of homes and property, the occupation of civilian residences, and repeated accounts of rape and sexual violence. The same devastation then spread into Gezira State after the militia entered the region in December 2023. Towns and villages were subjected to killings, looting and attacks, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee. Many of them had already escaped Khartoum and had gone to Gezira in search of safety. In June 2024, Wad Al-Noura became the site of one of the militia’s most notorious massacres in the state. Months later, a wave of attacks swept through villages in eastern Gezira, with Al-Sireha among the communities subjected to large-scale killings. The violence extended across dozens of villages and towns amid reports of killings, looting, arson, sexual violence and forced displacement. The pattern repeated itself across different parts of Sudan: the militia entered civilian communities, killings and looting followed, homes were occupied, people were detained, sexual violence was reported, and entire populations were forced to abandon their towns and villages. El Fasher became one of the bloodiest chapters in that trajectory. After a prolonged siege, the city fell to the Rapid Support Militia. United Nations investigators documented the killing of more than 6,000 people during the first three days, while the fate of an estimated 150,000 residents remained unknown. The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan subsequently concluded that the violations committed there bore hallmarks of genocide. As the geographical scale of these atrocities expanded and the war continued year after year, another question became central to international investigations: where was the militia obtaining the weapons, financing and supplies that allowed it to sustain its military capabilities? The Rapid Support Militia continued fighting on multiple fronts, acquiring weapons, ammunition, vehicles and drones while also deploying foreign fighters in a war stretching from Darfur to Khartoum, Gezira, Kordofan and El Fasher. From the early months of the conflict, evidence began accumulating around the UAE’s role in the supply network supporting the militia. In a report dated January 15, 2024, the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan said information it had gathered concerning the transfer of weapons and ammunition to the Rapid Support Militia through Amdjarass airport in eastern Chad was “credible.” In July 2024, The Guardian published an investigation into Emirati passports and documents discovered among equipment linked to the militia in Sudan. In September, The New York Times investigated UAE activity in Amdjarass and allegations that the humanitarian operation there was running alongside a pipeline supplying weapons and other support to the militia. The following month, The Washington Post published an investigation based on weapons captured by the Sudanese army, together with US assessments and reports, linking equipment and ammunition found in the hands of the Rapid Support Militia to the UAE. In November 2024, Amnesty International identified the French-made Galix defence system installed on UAE-manufactured Nimr Ajban armoured vehicles used by the militia. Flight data then revealed another dimension of the supply network. In December 2024, Reuters tracked at least 86 flights from the UAE to Amdjarass since the war began. A significant number were operated by companies previously linked in UN reporting to arms-transfer operations in the region. Researcher Justin Lynch also contributed to tracking and analysing flight and supply networks connecting these routes to the Rapid Support Militia. By early 2025, the issue had reached the level of official scrutiny in Washington. On January 24, Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Sara Jacobs said that, based on a briefing from the Biden administration and other reporting, they had confirmed that the UAE was continuing to provide weapons to the militia despite earlier assurances to Washington that it would stop. Over the following months, further evidence emerged from weapons stockpiles and supply convoys themselves. In April 2025, an investigation by France 24’s Observers team traced Bulgarian-made mortar rounds found in Darfur to a transaction involving an Emirati buyer, with the UAE Armed Forces listed in documentation as the end user. On April 29, Reuters, in an investigation involving journalist Reade Levinson, reported that the UN Panel of Experts was examining how Bulgarian ammunition officially exported to the UAE had ended up in a Rapid Support Militia supply convoy in Darfur. Bulgaria said it had never authorised the ammunition to be re-exported to Sudan. In May 2025, Amnesty International identified Chinese-made GB50A guided bombs and AH-4 155mm howitzers in the possession of the Rapid Support Militia. The organisation concluded that the weapons were “almost certainly” re-exported to Sudan by the UAE. As the investigations widened, a broader network emerged involving mercenaries, financing, companies and regional logistics. Beginning in 2024, Colombian investigative outlet La Silla Vacía exposed details of the recruitment of former Colombian soldiers to fight alongside the Rapid Support Militia. Subsequent investigations traced the networks used to recruit and transport these fighters, with UAE-based companies and routes repeatedly appearing in the reporting. Bellingcat has also investigated weapons and supply routes associated with the militia, while a joint investigation by Lighthouse Reports and its partners uncovered training camps, sites used to prepare weapons and vehicles, and supply convoys in eastern Libya connected to the Rapid Support Militia, along with Colombian mercenaries operating within the same network. On the financial side, The Sentry documented networks involving companies, gold trading, financing and property linked to senior Rapid Support Militia figures, including businesses and activities operating from within the UAE. These findings added a financial and commercial dimension to the military and logistical picture. In October 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that US intelligence agencies had detected an increase in the flow of Emirati weapons to the militia, including drones, light and heavy weapons, vehicles, artillery, mortars and ammunition. The UAE continues to deny providing military support to the Rapid Support Militia. Over the course of the war, however, a substantial body of reporting and investigation has accumulated from the UN Panel of Experts, US assessments and sources, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Reuters, France 24, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Lighthouse Reports, Bellingcat and The Sentry. These are multiple, independent sources using different investigative methods. Flight records, export documentation, weapons and ammunition analysis, corporate and property records, satellite imagery and testimony from people on the ground have each exposed different parts of a support network that helped sustain the militia’s war. Alongside the evidence concerning weapons, financing and logistics, direct indications of Hemedti’s own presence inside the UAE also emerged during the conflict. In June 2025, The New York Times reported, citing US officials, that Hemedti had stayed at a protected residence in Abu Dhabi, where he recorded video addresses to his supporters in Sudan. The Sentry also documented his personal ownership of three apartments in Dubai, close to Al Minhad military airbase. The photographs that surfaced this month add another dimension to those reports. Hemedti appears once again inside the UAE, this time in quiet family photographs, while the war led by his militia continues in Sudan and the consequences of its atrocities stretch from El Geneina to Khartoum, Gezira and El Fasher. The information is there. The investigations have been published. The evidence continues to accumulate. The question becomes more urgent with every new investigation: how much more evidence does the world need before it acts? #Sudan #RSFisTerroristOrganization #UAEKillsSudanesePeople #UAESponsorsTerrorism

Summer Holiday Photos Place the UAE-Backed Rapid Support Militia Leader in the Emirates as Atrocities Continue Across Sudan A series of photographs circulated on Sudanese social media this month that, at first glance, appeared entirely ordinary. A spacious courtyard at dusk, a customised Mercedes parked on a quiet street, and an older man sitting on a pale sofa with a child on his lap. They could easily have been photographs from any family summer holiday, far removed from the war, famine and mass graves that have come to define Sudan’s landscape. The older man in the photographs, however, is Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, commander of the UAE-backed Rapid Support Militia, the paramilitary force commonly associated with the Janjaweed. In January 2025, the United States sanctioned Hemedti by name as it formally determined that members of the Rapid Support Militia and allied militias had committed genocide in Darfur. The decision came after nearly two years of war in which atrocities attributed to the militia had spread across large parts of Sudan. In El Geneina, Human Rights Watch documented an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Masalit that included mass killings, rape, looting and forced displacement, among the most horrific episodes of violence since the war began. In Khartoum, the militia controlled large areas of the capital for months. Civilian homes and buildings were turned into military positions and detention facilities. As the Sudanese army advanced and retook areas previously held by the militia, detention sites, graves and bodies began to emerge, alongside testimony from survivors describing torture, starvation, humiliation and detention in brutal conditions. The period of militia control over large parts of Khartoum, Omdurman and Bahri was also marked by widespread looting of homes and property, the occupation of civilian residences, and repeated accounts of rape and sexual violence. The same devastation then spread into Gezira State after the militia entered the region in December 2023. Towns and villages were subjected to killings, looting and attacks, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee. Many of them had already escaped Khartoum and had gone to Gezira in search of safety. In June 2024, Wad Al-Noura became the site of one of the militia’s most notorious massacres in the state. Months later, a wave of attacks swept through villages in eastern Gezira, with Al-Sireha among the communities subjected to large-scale killings. The violence extended across dozens of villages and towns amid reports of killings, looting, arson, sexual violence and forced displacement. The pattern repeated itself across different parts of Sudan: the militia entered civilian communities, killings and looting followed, homes were occupied, people were detained, sexual violence was reported, and entire populations were forced to abandon their towns and villages. El Fasher became one of the bloodiest chapters in that trajectory. After a prolonged siege, the city fell to the Rapid Support Militia. United Nations investigators documented the killing of more than 6,000 people during the first three days, while the fate of an estimated 150,000 residents remained unknown. The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan subsequently concluded that the violations committed there bore hallmarks of genocide. As the geographical scale of these atrocities expanded and the war continued year after year, another question became central to international investigations: where was the militia obtaining the weapons, financing and supplies that allowed it to sustain its military capabilities? The Rapid Support Militia continued fighting on multiple fronts, acquiring weapons, ammunition, vehicles and drones while also deploying foreign fighters in a war stretching from Darfur to Khartoum, Gezira, Kordofan and El Fasher. From the early months of the conflict, evidence began accumulating around the UAE’s role in the supply network supporting the militia. In a report dated January 15, 2024, the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan said information it had gathered concerning the transfer of weapons and ammunition to the Rapid Support Militia through Amdjarass airport in eastern Chad was “credible.” In July 2024, The Guardian published an investigation into Emirati passports and documents discovered among equipment linked to the militia in Sudan. In September, The New York Times investigated UAE activity in Amdjarass and allegations that the humanitarian operation there was running alongside a pipeline supplying weapons and other support to the militia. The following month, The Washington Post published an investigation based on weapons captured by the Sudanese army, together with US assessments and reports, linking equipment and ammunition found in the hands of the Rapid Support Militia to the UAE. In November 2024, Amnesty International identified the French-made Galix defence system installed on UAE-manufactured Nimr Ajban armoured vehicles used by the militia. Flight data then revealed another dimension of the supply network. In December 2024, Reuters tracked at least 86 flights from the UAE to Amdjarass since the war began. A significant number were operated by companies previously linked in UN reporting to arms-transfer operations in the region. Researcher Justin Lynch also contributed to tracking and analysing flight and supply networks connecting these routes to the Rapid Support Militia. By early 2025, the issue had reached the level of official scrutiny in Washington. On January 24, Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Sara Jacobs said that, based on a briefing from the Biden administration and other reporting, they had confirmed that the UAE was continuing to provide weapons to the militia despite earlier assurances to Washington that it would stop. Over the following months, further evidence emerged from weapons stockpiles and supply convoys themselves. In April 2025, an investigation by France 24’s Observers team traced Bulgarian-made mortar rounds found in Darfur to a transaction involving an Emirati buyer, with the UAE Armed Forces listed in documentation as the end user. On April 29, Reuters, in an investigation involving journalist Reade Levinson, reported that the UN Panel of Experts was examining how Bulgarian ammunition officially exported to the UAE had ended up in a Rapid Support Militia supply convoy in Darfur. Bulgaria said it had never authorised the ammunition to be re-exported to Sudan. In May 2025, Amnesty International identified Chinese-made GB50A guided bombs and AH-4 155mm howitzers in the possession of the Rapid Support Militia. The organisation concluded that the weapons were “almost certainly” re-exported to Sudan by the UAE. As the investigations widened, a broader network emerged involving mercenaries, financing, companies and regional logistics. Beginning in 2024, Colombian investigative outlet La Silla Vacía exposed details of the recruitment of former Colombian soldiers to fight alongside the Rapid Support Militia. Subsequent investigations traced the networks used to recruit and transport these fighters, with UAE-based companies and routes repeatedly appearing in the reporting. Bellingcat has also investigated weapons and supply routes associated with the militia, while a joint investigation by Lighthouse Reports and its partners uncovered training camps, sites used to prepare weapons and vehicles, and supply convoys in eastern Libya connected to the Rapid Support Militia, along with Colombian mercenaries operating within the same network. On the financial side, The Sentry documented networks involving companies, gold trading, financing and property linked to senior Rapid Support Militia figures, including businesses and activities operating from within the UAE. These findings added a financial and commercial dimension to the military and logistical picture. In October 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that US intelligence agencies had detected an increase in the flow of Emirati weapons to the militia, including drones, light and heavy weapons, vehicles, artillery, mortars and ammunition. The UAE continues to deny providing military support to the Rapid Support Militia. Over the course of the war, however, a substantial body of reporting and investigation has accumulated from the UN Panel of Experts, US assessments and sources, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Reuters, France 24, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Lighthouse Reports, Bellingcat and The Sentry. These are multiple, independent sources using different investigative methods. Flight records, export documentation, weapons and ammunition analysis, corporate and property records, satellite imagery and testimony from people on the ground have each exposed different parts of a support network that helped sustain the militia’s war. Alongside the evidence concerning weapons, financing and logistics, direct indications of Hemedti’s own presence inside the UAE also emerged during the conflict. In June 2025, The New York Times reported, citing US officials, that Hemedti had stayed at a protected residence in Abu Dhabi, where he recorded video addresses to his supporters in Sudan. The Sentry also documented his personal ownership of three apartments in Dubai, close to Al Minhad military airbase. The photographs that surfaced this month add another dimension to those reports. Hemedti appears once again inside the UAE, this time in quiet family photographs, while the war led by his militia continues in Sudan and the consequences of its atrocities stretch from El Geneina to Khartoum, Gezira and El Fasher. The information is there. The investigations have been published. The evidence continues to accumulate. The question becomes more urgent with every new investigation: how much more evidence does the world need before it acts? #Sudan #RSFisTerroristOrganization #UAEKillsSudanesePeople #UAESponsorsTerrorism

Sudanese Echo

127,679 görüntüleme • 21 gün önce

We’re launching a campus organization, inspired by Charlie Kirk! A few months before Charlie Kirk was shot dead on a university campus, I had a long conversation with him — almost an hour. He was worried about Canadian universities. The cancel culture. The silencing of conservative students. The indoctrination factories he had spent his entire career fighting south of the border. He had seen it up close, and he asked me: were we going to fight back? I told him yes. Then, on September 10, 2025, a politically motivated sniper climbed onto a rooftop at Utah Valley University and put a bullet in Charlie Kirk’s neck while he was doing exactly what he always did — standing up for free speech on a university campus. I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then. Because Charlie understood something that too many people on our side still refuse to face: the university campus isn’t just where young people go to get degrees. It’s where the woke mob is manufactured. It’s where the cancel culture foot soldiers are recruited, trained, and radicalised — before being sent out into the world to tear down everything we hold dear. We’ve made real gains. Independent media is getting stronger. We win (sometimes) in the courts. And the battle for free speech has new allies, like Elon Musk and his social media platform, X. But the woke machine at our universities is still running at full capacity. You know the stories: Lindsay Shepherd was a 22-year-old teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University. She showed a short video clip of Jordan Peterson in class — as part of a lecture on a controversial topic. Her professors hauled her into an interrogation and compared her to a Nazi showing propaganda films. This past January, Conservative MP Garnett Genuis was refused permission to hold an event at York University. A sitting Member of Parliament — barred from speaking to students. Those are just the stories that got coverage. Every day, thousands of our students sit down, stay quiet, and self-censor — terrified of being destroyed by the mob before their careers have even started. And nobody is fighting for them. If we don’t fight at the source — inside the lecture halls and student unions where the actual indoctrination happens — we’re only ever chopping heads off a hydra. It will keep growing new ones. And right now, on Canadian campuses, our side has nobody. The Conservative Party’s campus clubs are too nervous to stick their necks out for anyone — they don’t want to risk their political careers. No think tank is focused on campuses. The faith communities, the advocacy organizations — all doing important work, but few of them are walking through the doors of our universities. That is why The Democracy Fund (The Democracy Fund) is launching Canadian Students for Free Speech — a TDF-led national network that will establish student-led, officially recognized free speech clubs on every post-secondary campus in Canada. If you care about free speech, if you want to support conservative and freedom-oriented students on Canada’s university campuses, learn more about Canadian Students for Free Speech and donate to help build it. Here is the plan. The Democracy Fund is recruiting students with backbone, and we will train them in campus organising and free speech philosophy. We will coach them step by step through the process of getting their clubs officially recognised by their universities — and trust me, that battle alone will be worth documenting and publishing. We will equip them with professionally printed posters, pamphlets, and proven messaging to promote free speech. Canadian Students for Free Speech will bring speakers directly to those campuses: Tamara Lich, and other freedom fighters who’ve been through the fire. Debates, town halls, and meet-and-greets that give conservative and freedom-loving students a reason to come together and realise they are not alone. Canadian Students for Free Speech will train every club member to document every act of censorship — and we will publish every story. And when the administration comes after them — and they will come after them — Canadian Students for Free Speech will show up with cameras, journalists, and The Democracy Fund’s lawyers. Our students will not face the mob alone. To do this properly, The Democracy Fund is hiring a full-time National Campus Coordinator. This is a real, demanding job. This person will travel coast to coast — from UBC to Dalhousie — recruiting student leaders, running training weekends, coordinating speaker tours, managing club applications, and fielding that call at midnight when a dean suddenly decides to cancel a student event. They will be the spine of the entire operation. Beyond the salary, there are real costs to account for: printed materials for clubs at dozens of campuses, travel expenses for our speakers, legal fees when universities try to block or deregister our clubs, and the infrastructure to run a national student network. This is not a small project. But then again, losing an entire generation to indoctrination is no small matter. REPORT by Ezra Levant 🍁🚛:

We’re launching a campus organization, inspired by Charlie Kirk! A few months before Charlie Kirk was shot dead on a university campus, I had a long conversation with him — almost an hour. He was worried about Canadian universities. The cancel culture. The silencing of conservative students. The indoctrination factories he had spent his entire career fighting south of the border. He had seen it up close, and he asked me: were we going to fight back? I told him yes. Then, on September 10, 2025, a politically motivated sniper climbed onto a rooftop at Utah Valley University and put a bullet in Charlie Kirk’s neck while he was doing exactly what he always did — standing up for free speech on a university campus. I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then. Because Charlie understood something that too many people on our side still refuse to face: the university campus isn’t just where young people go to get degrees. It’s where the woke mob is manufactured. It’s where the cancel culture foot soldiers are recruited, trained, and radicalised — before being sent out into the world to tear down everything we hold dear. We’ve made real gains. Independent media is getting stronger. We win (sometimes) in the courts. And the battle for free speech has new allies, like Elon Musk and his social media platform, X. But the woke machine at our universities is still running at full capacity. You know the stories: Lindsay Shepherd was a 22-year-old teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University. She showed a short video clip of Jordan Peterson in class — as part of a lecture on a controversial topic. Her professors hauled her into an interrogation and compared her to a Nazi showing propaganda films. This past January, Conservative MP Garnett Genuis was refused permission to hold an event at York University. A sitting Member of Parliament — barred from speaking to students. Those are just the stories that got coverage. Every day, thousands of our students sit down, stay quiet, and self-censor — terrified of being destroyed by the mob before their careers have even started. And nobody is fighting for them. If we don’t fight at the source — inside the lecture halls and student unions where the actual indoctrination happens — we’re only ever chopping heads off a hydra. It will keep growing new ones. And right now, on Canadian campuses, our side has nobody. The Conservative Party’s campus clubs are too nervous to stick their necks out for anyone — they don’t want to risk their political careers. No think tank is focused on campuses. The faith communities, the advocacy organizations — all doing important work, but few of them are walking through the doors of our universities. That is why The Democracy Fund (The Democracy Fund) is launching Canadian Students for Free Speech — a TDF-led national network that will establish student-led, officially recognized free speech clubs on every post-secondary campus in Canada. If you care about free speech, if you want to support conservative and freedom-oriented students on Canada’s university campuses, learn more about Canadian Students for Free Speech and donate to help build it. Here is the plan. The Democracy Fund is recruiting students with backbone, and we will train them in campus organising and free speech philosophy. We will coach them step by step through the process of getting their clubs officially recognised by their universities — and trust me, that battle alone will be worth documenting and publishing. We will equip them with professionally printed posters, pamphlets, and proven messaging to promote free speech. Canadian Students for Free Speech will bring speakers directly to those campuses: Tamara Lich, and other freedom fighters who’ve been through the fire. Debates, town halls, and meet-and-greets that give conservative and freedom-loving students a reason to come together and realise they are not alone. Canadian Students for Free Speech will train every club member to document every act of censorship — and we will publish every story. And when the administration comes after them — and they will come after them — Canadian Students for Free Speech will show up with cameras, journalists, and The Democracy Fund’s lawyers. Our students will not face the mob alone. To do this properly, The Democracy Fund is hiring a full-time National Campus Coordinator. This is a real, demanding job. This person will travel coast to coast — from UBC to Dalhousie — recruiting student leaders, running training weekends, coordinating speaker tours, managing club applications, and fielding that call at midnight when a dean suddenly decides to cancel a student event. They will be the spine of the entire operation. Beyond the salary, there are real costs to account for: printed materials for clubs at dozens of campuses, travel expenses for our speakers, legal fees when universities try to block or deregister our clubs, and the infrastructure to run a national student network. This is not a small project. But then again, losing an entire generation to indoctrination is no small matter. REPORT by Ezra Levant 🍁🚛:

Rebel News

28,042 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce

Woman files lawsuit after arrest for Facebook post concerning Trinidad water supply issues ... TRINIDAD, Texas - A Facebook post about problems with the City of Trinidad's water quality led to the arrest of a woman who now says she's filed a lawsuit against the city after calling the arrest "political retaliation." Police in the City of Trinidad, located in Henderson County around an hour south-east of Dallas, charged Jennifer Combs on May 8 with felony false alarm or report. Her arrest stems from a Facebook post she made on her ‘Southern Belle Watch' account, where she claimed that the city's water issues had led to hospitalizations due to bacteria. The post, in part, reads: "We have received reports that some citizens have been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. This is a serious public health concern that deserves immediate attention. If your water looks discolored, contains sediment, has a strong odor, or you have experienced related health issues, please send us a message. We are gathering information and reporting findings to the state." The Trinidad Police Department, in an April 6 Facebook post of their own, said Combs wrote "false information that creates fear, panic, or unnecessary emergency response within a community." A May 10 post from Trinidad Police Chief Charles Gregory doubled down on the decision to arrest Combs. Gregory claimed the case was "cut and dry," and Combs' claims about hospitalizations "are simply false and have only caused unnecessary fear and confusion in our community." "It was probably one of the most humiliating things I’ve ever gone through in my entire life. It was very, very bad." Combs, who tells FOX 4's David Sentendrey she's never received a speeding ticket, calls the ordeal of spending the night in jail "horrifying." "I feel like this is an extreme stretch," Combs said of her arrest. "There’s people that are saying that their appliances are getting ruined, they can’t cook with the water, they can’t bathe with it, they can’t do laundry," she continued. "A lot of them feel hushed, and like they don’t have a voice and no one listens to them and no one takes them seriously." Combs says multiple citizens had posted to Trinidad PD's Facebook page stating they were hospitalized or affected by consuming the city's water. Images provided to FOX 4 show brown water coming from faucets in sinks and bathtubs within the community. Combs described the city's water supply as looking like "the Trinity River is flowing from their water taps." A water boil had previously been issued for Trinidad on Apr. 21, several weeks after both Combs' post and the Trinidad Police Department's post. The boil was lifted on Apr. 23. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) confirmed to FOX 4 it received a complaint regarding the water quality in Trinidad, and that an investigation is ongoing. Trinidad officials did not deny that the city is struggling with its water supply. Dennis Haws, the Mayor of Trinidad, told Sentendrey on Tuesday that the city's water pipes date back to the 1950s. "We have to get to a position where we can fix that infrastructure, and it’s very expensive as I’m sure you can imagine," Haws said. "The city’s water situation is a struggle, without question." Haws would not confirm if anyone had gotten sick from drinking the city's water, but says there have been discussions on creating a committee to focus on the water issues. At a Trinidad City Council meeting on Tuesday, the city's water issues were a hot button topic. "The reason why everyone is here and the reason why FOX 4 is here, is because your city is acting like tyrants," one resident said. Police Chief Gregory was not present at Tuesday's meeting. "I really haven’t seen anything like this before." Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law professor at SMU, questions whether a crime was committed by Combs, and believes her First Amendment rights may have been violated. "She’s making a statement regarding a matter of great public interest and so people sometimes make false statements on matters of great public interest, and they’re allowed to do so." Combs has since filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Trinidad, which includes Chief Gregory, another member of the Trinidad Police Department and a Trinidad City Council member. The lawsuit states that Combs was arrested in "an act of deliberate political retaliation." CJ Grisham, the attorney representing Combs in the case, provided the following statement to FOX 4: "The City of Trinidad has become a cautionary tale of what happens when unchecked ego masquerades as governance. At the center of this ongoing constitutional crisis is the case of Jennifer Combs, whose unlawful treatment by city officials exposed a pattern of corruption, retaliation, and abuse of power that has infected the entire municipal apparatus. Rather than course-correct, city leadership has chosen to double down on its misconduct by engaging in an escalating campaign of retaliatory firings, punishing employees whose only offense was bearing witness to the truth or refusing to participate in the cover-up. The bitter irony is that the only individuals in this saga who have earned termination are Police Chief Gregory and City Councilwoman Marie Bannister, whose reckless abuse of authority and personal vendettas are not merely destroying careers: they are dismantling the institutional trust, public safety infrastructure, and financial stability of an entire community. Trinidad deserves leaders who serve its people, not officials who sacrifice them on the altar of wounded pride."

Woman files lawsuit after arrest for Facebook post concerning Trinidad water supply issues ... TRINIDAD, Texas - A Facebook post about problems with the City of Trinidad's water quality led to the arrest of a woman who now says she's filed a lawsuit against the city after calling the arrest "political retaliation." Police in the City of Trinidad, located in Henderson County around an hour south-east of Dallas, charged Jennifer Combs on May 8 with felony false alarm or report. Her arrest stems from a Facebook post she made on her ‘Southern Belle Watch' account, where she claimed that the city's water issues had led to hospitalizations due to bacteria. The post, in part, reads: "We have received reports that some citizens have been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. This is a serious public health concern that deserves immediate attention. If your water looks discolored, contains sediment, has a strong odor, or you have experienced related health issues, please send us a message. We are gathering information and reporting findings to the state." The Trinidad Police Department, in an April 6 Facebook post of their own, said Combs wrote "false information that creates fear, panic, or unnecessary emergency response within a community." A May 10 post from Trinidad Police Chief Charles Gregory doubled down on the decision to arrest Combs. Gregory claimed the case was "cut and dry," and Combs' claims about hospitalizations "are simply false and have only caused unnecessary fear and confusion in our community." "It was probably one of the most humiliating things I’ve ever gone through in my entire life. It was very, very bad." Combs, who tells FOX 4's David Sentendrey she's never received a speeding ticket, calls the ordeal of spending the night in jail "horrifying." "I feel like this is an extreme stretch," Combs said of her arrest. "There’s people that are saying that their appliances are getting ruined, they can’t cook with the water, they can’t bathe with it, they can’t do laundry," she continued. "A lot of them feel hushed, and like they don’t have a voice and no one listens to them and no one takes them seriously." Combs says multiple citizens had posted to Trinidad PD's Facebook page stating they were hospitalized or affected by consuming the city's water. Images provided to FOX 4 show brown water coming from faucets in sinks and bathtubs within the community. Combs described the city's water supply as looking like "the Trinity River is flowing from their water taps." A water boil had previously been issued for Trinidad on Apr. 21, several weeks after both Combs' post and the Trinidad Police Department's post. The boil was lifted on Apr. 23. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) confirmed to FOX 4 it received a complaint regarding the water quality in Trinidad, and that an investigation is ongoing. Trinidad officials did not deny that the city is struggling with its water supply. Dennis Haws, the Mayor of Trinidad, told Sentendrey on Tuesday that the city's water pipes date back to the 1950s. "We have to get to a position where we can fix that infrastructure, and it’s very expensive as I’m sure you can imagine," Haws said. "The city’s water situation is a struggle, without question." Haws would not confirm if anyone had gotten sick from drinking the city's water, but says there have been discussions on creating a committee to focus on the water issues. At a Trinidad City Council meeting on Tuesday, the city's water issues were a hot button topic. "The reason why everyone is here and the reason why FOX 4 is here, is because your city is acting like tyrants," one resident said. Police Chief Gregory was not present at Tuesday's meeting. "I really haven’t seen anything like this before." Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law professor at SMU, questions whether a crime was committed by Combs, and believes her First Amendment rights may have been violated. "She’s making a statement regarding a matter of great public interest and so people sometimes make false statements on matters of great public interest, and they’re allowed to do so." Combs has since filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Trinidad, which includes Chief Gregory, another member of the Trinidad Police Department and a Trinidad City Council member. The lawsuit states that Combs was arrested in "an act of deliberate political retaliation." CJ Grisham, the attorney representing Combs in the case, provided the following statement to FOX 4: "The City of Trinidad has become a cautionary tale of what happens when unchecked ego masquerades as governance. At the center of this ongoing constitutional crisis is the case of Jennifer Combs, whose unlawful treatment by city officials exposed a pattern of corruption, retaliation, and abuse of power that has infected the entire municipal apparatus. Rather than course-correct, city leadership has chosen to double down on its misconduct by engaging in an escalating campaign of retaliatory firings, punishing employees whose only offense was bearing witness to the truth or refusing to participate in the cover-up. The bitter irony is that the only individuals in this saga who have earned termination are Police Chief Gregory and City Councilwoman Marie Bannister, whose reckless abuse of authority and personal vendettas are not merely destroying careers: they are dismantling the institutional trust, public safety infrastructure, and financial stability of an entire community. Trinidad deserves leaders who serve its people, not officials who sacrifice them on the altar of wounded pride."

David Sentendrey

13,448 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce

BOOM!!! 💥💥💥 Dr. Aseem Malhotra's testimony was delivered in the Helsinski District Court on April 12, 2024, with the understanding that any deviation from the truth would constitute perjury. This clip was immediately banned by YouTube so please share widely. I've trimmed the clip, removing the interpreter's segment for a smoother listening experience. Here's the first hour of the testimony. ---------------------------------- My name is Doctor Aseem Malhotra. I am a consultant cardiologist. I've been a qualified doctor since 2001. I have held various roles both in academic health policy. In England, in the United Kingdom, and of the various roles, I won't bore you with all the details. I think three of the most relevant and prominent are the fact that I was an ambassador for the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges for six years, which represented every doctor in the UK. I served a full term of six years as a trustee of the King's fund. I was the youngest member to be appointed to this body which advises government on health policy. I was a founding member of Action on Sugar and a first science director. And through that role I'm considered the lead campaigner on bringing about a sugary drinks tax in the UK. And also, finally I served for five years as visiting professor of evidence based medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine in Salvador, Brazil. In early 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic I was most vocal doctor on the mainstream, making the link very early on between COVID and those who are vulnerable to suffering serious complications from COVID In fact, in March 2020, I was asked to go on Sky News to explain my initial research findings of the link between especially obesity and COVID, but also to give people an opportunity and to suggest to the government this was a great time for them to implement public health policy to help people enhance or optimise their immune system, which could happen within just a few weeks of dietary changes and optimising vitamin D. This was later also backed up by medical journal publications a few months later. And I was first to mention on the back of an article I published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, which became a front page commentary and was picked up by BBC News and Good Morning Britain, where I had said that it's likely our prime minister, Boris Johnson, was hospitalised because of his weight. As a result of that, the then secretary for health, Matt Hancock, and this was publicised in the news, had asked me to advise him on the link between COVID and obesity. ...before I explain my journey and in many ways U-turn on my understanding in terms of the benefits and harms of the COVID vaccine, my experience in this area over the last couple of years has made me realise more than ever that even for that the greatest barrier to the truth are not factual or intellectual barriers, but psychological. I think all of us as human beings are vulnerable to these psychological barriers and we should have compassion for ourselves. And I will just very briefly summarise those three psychological barriers before I get into my detailed account of what I was involved in in regards to the COVID vaccine. The first psychological barrier is one of fear. And many of us understandably, and I still remember from early on in the pandemic, we were all scared. We did not know what we were dealing with. The issue with fear is that when people and populations are in a state of fear, we are less likely to engage in critical thinking and we are more likely to be compliant. Although COVID was particularly devastating for vulnerable groups in the elderly and I even have managed and still manage people with long COVID, the fear was grossly exaggerated. And one of the examples of that is that when we had good information on the mortality rate of COVID in the United States, one survey in 2020 revealed that 50% of Americans believed that if they caught COVID, the risk of 19 hospitalisation was 50% one and two, when the actual figure, certainly an average for people in middle age, was less than 1%. The second barrier to the truth, which I think is very relevant to the situation we find ourselves in now, is one called willful blindness. This is when human beings, all of us, are vulnerable to this, turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety and to protect prestige and fragile egos. Some examples of this include, on a personal level, willful blindness can occur when a spouse turns a blind eye to the affair of their partner. On an institutional level, some great examples of willful blindness include Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, the Catholic Church and child molestation. I believe the current situation we find ourselves in, with much of the mainstream narrative and the medical establishment and policy makers not acknowledging quite horrific, serious and common harms from this vaccine, is another example of willful blindness. And I also say this with full empathy, because I was one of those people that was for a very long time, willfully blind to the harms of the COVID vaccine. In January 2021, I was one of the first people to take two doses of the COVID mRNA vaccine because I volunteered in a vaccine centre. I still believe that traditional vaccines are some of the safest amongst all pharmacological interventions in medicine and I could not conceive of any possibility whatsoever of this vaccine causing harm. As a public figure and respected doctor in the UK, I have built relationships across the board with many other public figures, including celebrities and politicians, who often come to me for medical advice. One of those people was film director Gurinder Chadha, who you may be familiar with some of her work, including the movie "Bend It like Beckham", who had asked me whether or not she should take the vaccine and had sent me blogs which I dismissed and regarded as anti vax nonsense. I was then asked to go on good morning, Britain because Gurinder Chadha, the director herself tweeted that I had convinced her to take the vaccine. The main reason for this TV appearance was to help tackle vaccine hesitancy, which was very prominent amongst people from ethnic minority groups in the UK. I made the point on that programme that I understand where vaccine hesitancy was coming from because of the history that I have been involved with over many years in highlighting the shortcomings of pharmaceutical industry influence over medicine. And I even made the point, if I remember correctly, that they have been found guilty of fraud on many occasions, that the third most common cause of death, prepandemic after heart disease and cancer, is prescribed medications. I, however, reassured the public and said that despite these figures, of everything we do in medicine, traditional vaccinations are amongst the safest. I still believe this to be the case. A few months later, in April 2021, I met with a colleague and friend of mine who I regard as one of the brightest cardiologists in the United Kingdom. I was surprised when he told me that he had not taken the COVID vaccine. He explained to me that he had concerns because he had seen in the supplementary appendix of Pfizer's original trial that there were four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group and only one in the placebo. These numbers were small and did not reach statistical significance. So this could be random chance, or his concern was it could represent a signal of problems in the future. And if this was the case, we are going to have a huge problem. He said he'd rather wait and see what happens before taking the vaccine. On July 26, 2021, my father, aged 73, who was a very prominent, well known doctor in the UK, including being the honorary vice president of the British Medical Association and had received honours from the Queen of England with an OBE, suffered an unexpected sudden cardiac arrest. I was particularly devastated by this happening and I was also I find it difficult to understand why my father, who was a fit and well man, I knew his cardiac history and his cardiac status, would suffer a cardiac arrest. But also my initial investigation was to try and understand why there had been a 30 minutes ambulance delay arriving to his apartment. Two weeks later, the deputy chief nurse of NHS England, a government health body, called me up. She was very upset, she knew my father very well and she was crying and she told me, Aseem, there's something I need to tell you. She in effect told me that throughout the country, for the last two months prior to my father's cardiac arrest in most regions of the UK, ambulances were not getting to patients in time for heart attacks and cardiac arrests. And there had been a deliberate, and I will use these words because I mentioned it, I've mentioned it before, a cover up involving the government and the Department of Health to withhold this information from doctors and the public. I worked with an investigative journalist with the I newspaper in the UK to write an article and a news story that became BBC News headlines a few months later, exposing this. Just before I exposed this, I messaged a professor of cardiology who I trust in the UK. He has a leadership role to explain to him what had happened and what I was about to do. I have text message evidence of this. He told me not to do this because it would make me enemies. I explained to him that I had a duty to patients and the public. I'm highlighting this as one example and I'll give you more examples of a cultural problem within medicine. The next part of this story is the post mortem findings of my father. They did not make any sense to me. I am considered a leading expert, maybe in the world, on the development and progression of coronary artery disease. My father had two severe blockages in his coronary arteries. There was no actual evidence of heart attack and likely there was a rhythm disturbance because of reduced blood supply that led to his cardiac arrest. Then in, within the space of a few weeks, around October and November, 3, different sources of information was brought to my attention that made me realise that there was probably a significant problem with the COVID mRNA vaccine. The first in October 2021. I remember I was giving lectures in Stockholm. I was contacted by a journalist with a Times newspaper who reported to me and said, Dr Malhotra, we have reports of an unexplained 25% increase in heart attacks in hospitals in Scotland and asked me what I thought was going on. I explained to her that at that time, with the evidence I knew in my own experience, I said that two likely contributory factors were lockdown stress. We know that when populations undergo severe stress after war, for example, there is an increase in heart attacks and strokes that can last for many years. She asked me whether I thought that there was a contribution. I was surprised when she asked me whether I thought there may be a contribution of the COVID vaccine to these heart attacks. I said to her, a good scientist should never exclude any possibility. But I felt at the time it was unlikely to be related to the COVID vaccine. But we should watch this space and keep our eyes open. A few weeks later, a publication appeared in the Journal Circulation, which is considered the highest impact cardiology journal in the United States that revealed a potentially very strong link between the COVID mRNA vaccines and acceleration in heart attack risk. Very specifically, in several hundred people of middle age, there was a plausible mechanism, by use of inflammatory markers in the blood, that increased the baseline risk of those people having a heart attack in five years, from 11% to 25%, just within two months of having the COVID mRNA vaccines. Of course, this is one bit of data, but even if partially true, that is a huge increase in risk in a very short space of time. And for me now made me think and link back to why my father may have suffered a cardiac arrest six months after having two doses of the vaccine. I remember thinking and speaking to a colleague, that if this was true, then we were going to see an increase in cardiac arrests, heart attacks and excess deaths in heavily vaccinated countries for the next few years. Then within a few weeks, I was called up by a whistleblower at a very prestigious british institution. I will name that institution, which I have not done publicly before as a University of Oxford. This cardiologist explained to me that a group of researchers in his department had accidentally found, through the use of very specialised imaging of the heart, that there was a signal of increased inflammation of the heart arteries, which was there in the vaccinated, but not there in the unvaccinated. The lead researcher of that group had sat down, the juniors, and had said that we are not going to explore these findings any further because it may affect our funding from the pharmaceutical industry. At that point, with these three bits of information, I then felt it was my ethical duty to speak out. And I went on GBNews to talk about what I'd found what I'd heard and I'd asked for the Vaccine Committee of the UK on TV to investigate this, to see whether there was a real problem with the vaccine in relation to heart issues. Around the same time which I found very strange is that the Secretary of State for Health at that stage, who was not Matt Hancock, was Sajid Javid, had announced in parliament that we are going to introduce legislation to ensure that all healthcare workers are mandated to have the COVID vaccine. For me, this, by that stage had no ethical or scientific justification, because certainly after the summer of 2021, it had become very apparent that the COVID mRNA vaccine was not stopping infection and it certainly was not stopping transmission. It was understood that approximately 80,000 NHS workers had refused at this stage to have the COVID vaccine. And now they were threatened with losing their job if by April the following year they had not been fully vaccinated. Many of these people were very concerned and contacted me around that time, I was also conducting many interviews, both through the BBC and Sky News and GBNews in regards to what happened with my father's ambulance delay. And I used it as an opportunity on the mainstream media to call for Sajid Javid, the secretary for health, to U-turn on the introduction of a mandate for healthcare workers based upon the fact that I felt it was not scientific and it was unethical. I also received my own personal backlash from these comments where I was contacted by the Royal College of Physicians who I had an affiliation with, and they asked me to respond to anonymous complaints from doctors that I was spreading, in quotes, antivax disinformation. I felt with my own knowledge and experience of the healthcare system that this was a direct response probably fueled by a combination of willful blindness and institutional corruption. To elaborate a bit further, when I say institutional corruption, I mean that my view was that the complaints were likely being fueled by academics with financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. I felt very concerned about the potential introduction of the vaccine, well, the vaccine mandate. And therefore I decided there were two things that I decided to do. The first was I made a phone call to the chairman of the British Medical Association in December 2021. I had a good relationship with him and he respected my opinion. And I spent 2 hours on the phone explaining to him everything that I knew up to that stage about my concerns of the COVID mRNA vaccine. He said to me, "Aseem, nobody appears to critically appraise the evidence on the COVID mRNA vaccine as well as you have from our conversation, he said, most of my colleagues are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC". This was replicated by the former chair of the CDC in the United States, Rochelle Walensky, who in an interview later on had said that her initial optimism of the vaccine benefits came from CNN News report. I say this just to emphasise that we should all accept our vulnerabilities to where we receive health information. Even doctors, policymakers, judges and lawyers are all influenced on the public massively by mainstream media. The chairman of the BMA also agreed with me. There was no ethical or scientific justification for mandating the COVID vaccine. He said the BMA also did not support it. And he said because of my conversation with him, he would speak directly to the secretary for health, Sajid Javid. One month later, at the end of January 2022, the COVID vaccine mandate for healthcare workers was overturned. I at that stage, given the fact that there was some backlash happening towards me, I realised that because this is a very big issue and area, and not my initial area of expertise, I needed to carry out my own critical analysis of the COVID mRNA vaccines. I spent six to nine months critically appraising the data, including speaking to two Pfizer whistleblowers, three investigative medical journalists and eminent scientists from the University of Oxford, Stanford and Harvard. The most critical bit, the most critical research that was published on this issue, which I think the whole court should acknowledge in August 2022, was published in the journal Vaccine. That research was conducted by some of the world's top independent of drug industry influence academics. That research, we was able to reanalyze the original randomised control trials conducted by Pfizer and Moderna. They were able to do this because new information was made available on the FDA's website and Health Canada's website. The conclusions of that paper were really very disturbing. The original trials that led to the drug regulatory approval of these vaccines revealed that you were more likely to suffer serious harm from taking the vaccine, specifically hospitalisation, life changing event or disability, than you were to be hospitalised with COVID That rate of harm at two months was very high at 1 in 800. Just to give you some perspective, historically we have suspended other vaccines for much less. In 1976, the swine flu vaccine was pulled because it was found to cause a neurological syndrome called Guillain-Barre syndrome In one in 100,000 people. In 1999, the rotavirus vaccine was suspended because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in children affecting 1 in 10,000. This was 1 in 800. In my view, it was very clear that given this information, published in the highest impact Vaccine journal in the world, peer reviewed, and has not had any significant rebuttals, that this vaccine now, in my view, should never have been approved for use in a single human being in the first place. In my view, this very important court case in some ways, actually is a distraction from the much bigger issue, which is there should be court cases around the world with a full inquiry into the pharmaceutical industry and an inquiry as to how we got this so very wrong. Of course, one could argue this is just one bit of research, but actually, unfortunately, there are different, many different strands of research that are showing a signal of considerable and common serious harm from these vaccines. From pharmacovigilance data that is reporting what we call yellow card reports from the public. We have plausible biological mechanism of harm. We have other research called observational data. We have autopsy data also confirming that certainly with the majority of people who died within a short space of time of having the vaccine in relation to the heart, was definitively caused by the vaccine. This is really a very, very, very horrific situation we find ourselves in. One would hope and expect that the regulators should be independently evaluating all medications. But of course, the evidence reveals this is far from true. There was an investigation by the BMJ, also published in the summer of 2022, which revealed that most of the major regulators across the world were taking most of their money from the drug industry. For example, the MHRA in the UK receives 86% of its funding from the drug industry, and the FDA in America receives 65% of its funding from the drug industry, A fact that most doctors do not know. And therefore, I would not expect members of the court to know this either, is that very, very rarely do drug industry sponsored research get independently evaluated. Clinical trial data can often involve thousands of pages of information on individual patients. The drug companies hold onto that raw data. They then give summary results to the regulator, who are then paying, who have an incentive to approve the drugs, and the drugs are then approved. I made these points in my peer reviewed article published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in September 2022, where I concluded that we should pause and investigate the issue around the COVID mRNA vaccines. I have since then been campaigning and advocating for a return to ethical evidence based medical practise around the world. Some of the clear solutions moving forward would be changes in the law that are required so that patients, doctors, members of the public can have greater confidence in the information they receive to make decisions about their health. Two very clear, low hanging fruit solutions, which are both ethical, scientific and democratic, would be that the drug industry should be allowed to develop drugs, but they shouldn't be allowed to test them themselves. And they certainly shouldn't be allowed to design their own research to and hold onto the raw data. Their information needs to be independently evaluated. One other clear solution would also be that the medical regulators, again, should not be taking any money from the industry, as this is a gross conflict of interest. I also want to highlight for people to understand the bigger picture. Prior to the pandemic, I had realised that there was a big problem with the reliability of clinical research, where invariably the results of clinical trials on all drugs sponsored by the drug industry, grossly exaggerate their safety and benefits. I have taken this information to the European Parliament, where I spoke in 2019, and I spoke to very senior politicians in the UK government. But although they were sympathetic, they felt that the issue was much bigger than them as individuals, and therefore it also needed media attention to get public awareness on the importance of such an inquiry. Before we continue with further questions, as I've been speaking for quite a long time now I'll just finish with two references just for the court and the judges to understand just how bad this problem is. Prepandemic the man who I call the Stephen Hawking of medicine is Professor John Ioannidis from the University of Stanford. The reason I call him the Stephen Hawking of Medicine is he's the most cited medical researcher in the world and is a mathematical genius. In 2006, he published a paper which was entitled why most published research findings are false. In that paper, he makes a point that the greater the financial interests in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. I say this in context of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine which has made the company $100 billion. The other point that he makes in a further paper in 2017 is, again, the reason the system continues as it is is most doctors are unaware of the information they receive when they make clinical decisions has been corrupted by commercial influence. The other credible name I will mention is the editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, who I personally know. In 2015, he wrote an article in the Lancet in relation to a secret meeting that had taken place with himself and some of the world's top medical academics. In that, he wrote that possibly half of the medical published literature may simply be untrue. And he said that science has taken a turn towards darkness. But who's going to take the first step to clean up the system? I believe in this case and in this court today, this is going to be a very pivotal potential moment in history for that first step. ---------------------- Dr Aseem Malhotra H/T: Tiina Keskimäki 🇫🇮

BOOM!!! 💥💥💥 Dr. Aseem Malhotra's testimony was delivered in the Helsinski District Court on April 12, 2024, with the understanding that any deviation from the truth would constitute perjury. This clip was immediately banned by YouTube so please share widely. I've trimmed the clip, removing the interpreter's segment for a smoother listening experience. Here's the first hour of the testimony. ---------------------------------- My name is Doctor Aseem Malhotra. I am a consultant cardiologist. I've been a qualified doctor since 2001. I have held various roles both in academic health policy. In England, in the United Kingdom, and of the various roles, I won't bore you with all the details. I think three of the most relevant and prominent are the fact that I was an ambassador for the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges for six years, which represented every doctor in the UK. I served a full term of six years as a trustee of the King's fund. I was the youngest member to be appointed to this body which advises government on health policy. I was a founding member of Action on Sugar and a first science director. And through that role I'm considered the lead campaigner on bringing about a sugary drinks tax in the UK. And also, finally I served for five years as visiting professor of evidence based medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine in Salvador, Brazil. In early 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic I was most vocal doctor on the mainstream, making the link very early on between COVID and those who are vulnerable to suffering serious complications from COVID In fact, in March 2020, I was asked to go on Sky News to explain my initial research findings of the link between especially obesity and COVID, but also to give people an opportunity and to suggest to the government this was a great time for them to implement public health policy to help people enhance or optimise their immune system, which could happen within just a few weeks of dietary changes and optimising vitamin D. This was later also backed up by medical journal publications a few months later. And I was first to mention on the back of an article I published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, which became a front page commentary and was picked up by BBC News and Good Morning Britain, where I had said that it's likely our prime minister, Boris Johnson, was hospitalised because of his weight. As a result of that, the then secretary for health, Matt Hancock, and this was publicised in the news, had asked me to advise him on the link between COVID and obesity. ...before I explain my journey and in many ways U-turn on my understanding in terms of the benefits and harms of the COVID vaccine, my experience in this area over the last couple of years has made me realise more than ever that even for that the greatest barrier to the truth are not factual or intellectual barriers, but psychological. I think all of us as human beings are vulnerable to these psychological barriers and we should have compassion for ourselves. And I will just very briefly summarise those three psychological barriers before I get into my detailed account of what I was involved in in regards to the COVID vaccine. The first psychological barrier is one of fear. And many of us understandably, and I still remember from early on in the pandemic, we were all scared. We did not know what we were dealing with. The issue with fear is that when people and populations are in a state of fear, we are less likely to engage in critical thinking and we are more likely to be compliant. Although COVID was particularly devastating for vulnerable groups in the elderly and I even have managed and still manage people with long COVID, the fear was grossly exaggerated. And one of the examples of that is that when we had good information on the mortality rate of COVID in the United States, one survey in 2020 revealed that 50% of Americans believed that if they caught COVID, the risk of 19 hospitalisation was 50% one and two, when the actual figure, certainly an average for people in middle age, was less than 1%. The second barrier to the truth, which I think is very relevant to the situation we find ourselves in now, is one called willful blindness. This is when human beings, all of us, are vulnerable to this, turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety and to protect prestige and fragile egos. Some examples of this include, on a personal level, willful blindness can occur when a spouse turns a blind eye to the affair of their partner. On an institutional level, some great examples of willful blindness include Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, the Catholic Church and child molestation. I believe the current situation we find ourselves in, with much of the mainstream narrative and the medical establishment and policy makers not acknowledging quite horrific, serious and common harms from this vaccine, is another example of willful blindness. And I also say this with full empathy, because I was one of those people that was for a very long time, willfully blind to the harms of the COVID vaccine. In January 2021, I was one of the first people to take two doses of the COVID mRNA vaccine because I volunteered in a vaccine centre. I still believe that traditional vaccines are some of the safest amongst all pharmacological interventions in medicine and I could not conceive of any possibility whatsoever of this vaccine causing harm. As a public figure and respected doctor in the UK, I have built relationships across the board with many other public figures, including celebrities and politicians, who often come to me for medical advice. One of those people was film director Gurinder Chadha, who you may be familiar with some of her work, including the movie "Bend It like Beckham", who had asked me whether or not she should take the vaccine and had sent me blogs which I dismissed and regarded as anti vax nonsense. I was then asked to go on good morning, Britain because Gurinder Chadha, the director herself tweeted that I had convinced her to take the vaccine. The main reason for this TV appearance was to help tackle vaccine hesitancy, which was very prominent amongst people from ethnic minority groups in the UK. I made the point on that programme that I understand where vaccine hesitancy was coming from because of the history that I have been involved with over many years in highlighting the shortcomings of pharmaceutical industry influence over medicine. And I even made the point, if I remember correctly, that they have been found guilty of fraud on many occasions, that the third most common cause of death, prepandemic after heart disease and cancer, is prescribed medications. I, however, reassured the public and said that despite these figures, of everything we do in medicine, traditional vaccinations are amongst the safest. I still believe this to be the case. A few months later, in April 2021, I met with a colleague and friend of mine who I regard as one of the brightest cardiologists in the United Kingdom. I was surprised when he told me that he had not taken the COVID vaccine. He explained to me that he had concerns because he had seen in the supplementary appendix of Pfizer's original trial that there were four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group and only one in the placebo. These numbers were small and did not reach statistical significance. So this could be random chance, or his concern was it could represent a signal of problems in the future. And if this was the case, we are going to have a huge problem. He said he'd rather wait and see what happens before taking the vaccine. On July 26, 2021, my father, aged 73, who was a very prominent, well known doctor in the UK, including being the honorary vice president of the British Medical Association and had received honours from the Queen of England with an OBE, suffered an unexpected sudden cardiac arrest. I was particularly devastated by this happening and I was also I find it difficult to understand why my father, who was a fit and well man, I knew his cardiac history and his cardiac status, would suffer a cardiac arrest. But also my initial investigation was to try and understand why there had been a 30 minutes ambulance delay arriving to his apartment. Two weeks later, the deputy chief nurse of NHS England, a government health body, called me up. She was very upset, she knew my father very well and she was crying and she told me, Aseem, there's something I need to tell you. She in effect told me that throughout the country, for the last two months prior to my father's cardiac arrest in most regions of the UK, ambulances were not getting to patients in time for heart attacks and cardiac arrests. And there had been a deliberate, and I will use these words because I mentioned it, I've mentioned it before, a cover up involving the government and the Department of Health to withhold this information from doctors and the public. I worked with an investigative journalist with the I newspaper in the UK to write an article and a news story that became BBC News headlines a few months later, exposing this. Just before I exposed this, I messaged a professor of cardiology who I trust in the UK. He has a leadership role to explain to him what had happened and what I was about to do. I have text message evidence of this. He told me not to do this because it would make me enemies. I explained to him that I had a duty to patients and the public. I'm highlighting this as one example and I'll give you more examples of a cultural problem within medicine. The next part of this story is the post mortem findings of my father. They did not make any sense to me. I am considered a leading expert, maybe in the world, on the development and progression of coronary artery disease. My father had two severe blockages in his coronary arteries. There was no actual evidence of heart attack and likely there was a rhythm disturbance because of reduced blood supply that led to his cardiac arrest. Then in, within the space of a few weeks, around October and November, 3, different sources of information was brought to my attention that made me realise that there was probably a significant problem with the COVID mRNA vaccine. The first in October 2021. I remember I was giving lectures in Stockholm. I was contacted by a journalist with a Times newspaper who reported to me and said, Dr Malhotra, we have reports of an unexplained 25% increase in heart attacks in hospitals in Scotland and asked me what I thought was going on. I explained to her that at that time, with the evidence I knew in my own experience, I said that two likely contributory factors were lockdown stress. We know that when populations undergo severe stress after war, for example, there is an increase in heart attacks and strokes that can last for many years. She asked me whether I thought that there was a contribution. I was surprised when she asked me whether I thought there may be a contribution of the COVID vaccine to these heart attacks. I said to her, a good scientist should never exclude any possibility. But I felt at the time it was unlikely to be related to the COVID vaccine. But we should watch this space and keep our eyes open. A few weeks later, a publication appeared in the Journal Circulation, which is considered the highest impact cardiology journal in the United States that revealed a potentially very strong link between the COVID mRNA vaccines and acceleration in heart attack risk. Very specifically, in several hundred people of middle age, there was a plausible mechanism, by use of inflammatory markers in the blood, that increased the baseline risk of those people having a heart attack in five years, from 11% to 25%, just within two months of having the COVID mRNA vaccines. Of course, this is one bit of data, but even if partially true, that is a huge increase in risk in a very short space of time. And for me now made me think and link back to why my father may have suffered a cardiac arrest six months after having two doses of the vaccine. I remember thinking and speaking to a colleague, that if this was true, then we were going to see an increase in cardiac arrests, heart attacks and excess deaths in heavily vaccinated countries for the next few years. Then within a few weeks, I was called up by a whistleblower at a very prestigious british institution. I will name that institution, which I have not done publicly before as a University of Oxford. This cardiologist explained to me that a group of researchers in his department had accidentally found, through the use of very specialised imaging of the heart, that there was a signal of increased inflammation of the heart arteries, which was there in the vaccinated, but not there in the unvaccinated. The lead researcher of that group had sat down, the juniors, and had said that we are not going to explore these findings any further because it may affect our funding from the pharmaceutical industry. At that point, with these three bits of information, I then felt it was my ethical duty to speak out. And I went on GBNews to talk about what I'd found what I'd heard and I'd asked for the Vaccine Committee of the UK on TV to investigate this, to see whether there was a real problem with the vaccine in relation to heart issues. Around the same time which I found very strange is that the Secretary of State for Health at that stage, who was not Matt Hancock, was Sajid Javid, had announced in parliament that we are going to introduce legislation to ensure that all healthcare workers are mandated to have the COVID vaccine. For me, this, by that stage had no ethical or scientific justification, because certainly after the summer of 2021, it had become very apparent that the COVID mRNA vaccine was not stopping infection and it certainly was not stopping transmission. It was understood that approximately 80,000 NHS workers had refused at this stage to have the COVID vaccine. And now they were threatened with losing their job if by April the following year they had not been fully vaccinated. Many of these people were very concerned and contacted me around that time, I was also conducting many interviews, both through the BBC and Sky News and GBNews in regards to what happened with my father's ambulance delay. And I used it as an opportunity on the mainstream media to call for Sajid Javid, the secretary for health, to U-turn on the introduction of a mandate for healthcare workers based upon the fact that I felt it was not scientific and it was unethical. I also received my own personal backlash from these comments where I was contacted by the Royal College of Physicians who I had an affiliation with, and they asked me to respond to anonymous complaints from doctors that I was spreading, in quotes, antivax disinformation. I felt with my own knowledge and experience of the healthcare system that this was a direct response probably fueled by a combination of willful blindness and institutional corruption. To elaborate a bit further, when I say institutional corruption, I mean that my view was that the complaints were likely being fueled by academics with financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. I felt very concerned about the potential introduction of the vaccine, well, the vaccine mandate. And therefore I decided there were two things that I decided to do. The first was I made a phone call to the chairman of the British Medical Association in December 2021. I had a good relationship with him and he respected my opinion. And I spent 2 hours on the phone explaining to him everything that I knew up to that stage about my concerns of the COVID mRNA vaccine. He said to me, "Aseem, nobody appears to critically appraise the evidence on the COVID mRNA vaccine as well as you have from our conversation, he said, most of my colleagues are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC". This was replicated by the former chair of the CDC in the United States, Rochelle Walensky, who in an interview later on had said that her initial optimism of the vaccine benefits came from CNN News report. I say this just to emphasise that we should all accept our vulnerabilities to where we receive health information. Even doctors, policymakers, judges and lawyers are all influenced on the public massively by mainstream media. The chairman of the BMA also agreed with me. There was no ethical or scientific justification for mandating the COVID vaccine. He said the BMA also did not support it. And he said because of my conversation with him, he would speak directly to the secretary for health, Sajid Javid. One month later, at the end of January 2022, the COVID vaccine mandate for healthcare workers was overturned. I at that stage, given the fact that there was some backlash happening towards me, I realised that because this is a very big issue and area, and not my initial area of expertise, I needed to carry out my own critical analysis of the COVID mRNA vaccines. I spent six to nine months critically appraising the data, including speaking to two Pfizer whistleblowers, three investigative medical journalists and eminent scientists from the University of Oxford, Stanford and Harvard. The most critical bit, the most critical research that was published on this issue, which I think the whole court should acknowledge in August 2022, was published in the journal Vaccine. That research was conducted by some of the world's top independent of drug industry influence academics. That research, we was able to reanalyze the original randomised control trials conducted by Pfizer and Moderna. They were able to do this because new information was made available on the FDA's website and Health Canada's website. The conclusions of that paper were really very disturbing. The original trials that led to the drug regulatory approval of these vaccines revealed that you were more likely to suffer serious harm from taking the vaccine, specifically hospitalisation, life changing event or disability, than you were to be hospitalised with COVID That rate of harm at two months was very high at 1 in 800. Just to give you some perspective, historically we have suspended other vaccines for much less. In 1976, the swine flu vaccine was pulled because it was found to cause a neurological syndrome called Guillain-Barre syndrome In one in 100,000 people. In 1999, the rotavirus vaccine was suspended because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in children affecting 1 in 10,000. This was 1 in 800. In my view, it was very clear that given this information, published in the highest impact Vaccine journal in the world, peer reviewed, and has not had any significant rebuttals, that this vaccine now, in my view, should never have been approved for use in a single human being in the first place. In my view, this very important court case in some ways, actually is a distraction from the much bigger issue, which is there should be court cases around the world with a full inquiry into the pharmaceutical industry and an inquiry as to how we got this so very wrong. Of course, one could argue this is just one bit of research, but actually, unfortunately, there are different, many different strands of research that are showing a signal of considerable and common serious harm from these vaccines. From pharmacovigilance data that is reporting what we call yellow card reports from the public. We have plausible biological mechanism of harm. We have other research called observational data. We have autopsy data also confirming that certainly with the majority of people who died within a short space of time of having the vaccine in relation to the heart, was definitively caused by the vaccine. This is really a very, very, very horrific situation we find ourselves in. One would hope and expect that the regulators should be independently evaluating all medications. But of course, the evidence reveals this is far from true. There was an investigation by the BMJ, also published in the summer of 2022, which revealed that most of the major regulators across the world were taking most of their money from the drug industry. For example, the MHRA in the UK receives 86% of its funding from the drug industry, and the FDA in America receives 65% of its funding from the drug industry, A fact that most doctors do not know. And therefore, I would not expect members of the court to know this either, is that very, very rarely do drug industry sponsored research get independently evaluated. Clinical trial data can often involve thousands of pages of information on individual patients. The drug companies hold onto that raw data. They then give summary results to the regulator, who are then paying, who have an incentive to approve the drugs, and the drugs are then approved. I made these points in my peer reviewed article published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in September 2022, where I concluded that we should pause and investigate the issue around the COVID mRNA vaccines. I have since then been campaigning and advocating for a return to ethical evidence based medical practise around the world. Some of the clear solutions moving forward would be changes in the law that are required so that patients, doctors, members of the public can have greater confidence in the information they receive to make decisions about their health. Two very clear, low hanging fruit solutions, which are both ethical, scientific and democratic, would be that the drug industry should be allowed to develop drugs, but they shouldn't be allowed to test them themselves. And they certainly shouldn't be allowed to design their own research to and hold onto the raw data. Their information needs to be independently evaluated. One other clear solution would also be that the medical regulators, again, should not be taking any money from the industry, as this is a gross conflict of interest. I also want to highlight for people to understand the bigger picture. Prior to the pandemic, I had realised that there was a big problem with the reliability of clinical research, where invariably the results of clinical trials on all drugs sponsored by the drug industry, grossly exaggerate their safety and benefits. I have taken this information to the European Parliament, where I spoke in 2019, and I spoke to very senior politicians in the UK government. But although they were sympathetic, they felt that the issue was much bigger than them as individuals, and therefore it also needed media attention to get public awareness on the importance of such an inquiry. Before we continue with further questions, as I've been speaking for quite a long time now I'll just finish with two references just for the court and the judges to understand just how bad this problem is. Prepandemic the man who I call the Stephen Hawking of medicine is Professor John Ioannidis from the University of Stanford. The reason I call him the Stephen Hawking of Medicine is he's the most cited medical researcher in the world and is a mathematical genius. In 2006, he published a paper which was entitled why most published research findings are false. In that paper, he makes a point that the greater the financial interests in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. I say this in context of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine which has made the company $100 billion. The other point that he makes in a further paper in 2017 is, again, the reason the system continues as it is is most doctors are unaware of the information they receive when they make clinical decisions has been corrupted by commercial influence. The other credible name I will mention is the editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, who I personally know. In 2015, he wrote an article in the Lancet in relation to a secret meeting that had taken place with himself and some of the world's top medical academics. In that, he wrote that possibly half of the medical published literature may simply be untrue. And he said that science has taken a turn towards darkness. But who's going to take the first step to clean up the system? I believe in this case and in this court today, this is going to be a very pivotal potential moment in history for that first step. ---------------------- Dr Aseem Malhotra H/T: Tiina Keskimäki 🇫🇮

aussie17

798,882 görüntüleme • 2 yıl önce

RETWEET Watching Dimakatso Makoena saying that “I Hate Foreigners” with such raw emotion and painfully crying in this attached BBC documentary film makes you realise how evil and manipulative failed politicians can be towards unsuspecting citizens who are victims of their failures. South Africa has an immigration crisis that can’t be wished away, but it is also a complex problem that can’t be explained in simplistic terms as many try to do, especially the authors of the crisis, politicians. South Africans were not born hating foreign nationals, like racism, they were taught to hate and to believe that all their problems were authored by African foreign nationals, both legal and illegal immigrants. The explanation for every political and economic failure in South Africa is now on foreigners, even someone who can’t get an erection at home will soon probably blame foreigners too. It is true that South Africa has attracted more foreigners than any other country on the continent because of its historic successful and big economy, and how the apartheid economic architecture attracted cheap migrant labour from surrounding countries to maximise on its profits. Apartheid was a racist business model run by politicians and businesspeople, today’s South Africa is also run by one of the richest businesspeople in Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, whose many businesses have benefited from migrant labour. Unlike in the past where mass immigration was triggered mainly by weak economies coming out of colonial rule that surrounded the apartheid regime, the bulk of illegal immigration today is now triggered by failed economies around South Africa particularly Zimbabwe, which has failed due to grand incompetence and political repressive corrupt rule. Why is it like this, and who is responsible for this immigration crisis, and how can this be changed to bring a healthy balance of immigration/migration which is not only one way? This has been caused by a dead economy in Zimbabwe which was killed by corrupt rule and the plunder of that country’s natural resources. Zimbabweans used to find work in Zimbabwe and had working public services like hospitals after that country's independence in 1980, and only went to South Africa to buy things to come and sell back home, it was business from top to bottom. Of course, as I said earlier, there was an earlier flow of migrants from Zimbabwe and other African countries during the colonial days of the famed WNLA which stood for Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), more popularly known as WENELA. It was set up by the gold mines in South Africa as a recruiting agency for migrant workers. Before that people were always moving around the region looking for better pastures and a better standard of living, Africa was a village. That is how you ended up with the Ray Phiris, Hugh Masekelas (whose real surname was Munyepawu from Zimbabwe) and Herman Mashabas of this world. Their parents, grandparents and great grand parents came to South Africa to seek better lives and also to seek work mostly in mines after the nineteenth century, they were born in South Africa to migrant workers or children of migrant workers. Today’s illegal immigration crisis is driven by old factors of cheap labour on the part of South African businesses, and it is accentuated by new political players, the failed regional ruling parties like ZANUPF. In normal countries this is easily resolved by an election where the citizens can choose a different government and remove the crooks and incompetent parties from power. But Zimbabwe is not normal, it has a ruling party which came into power with its own military wings, ZANLA/ZIPRA which became the national army. Elections are routinely rigged, and citizens beaten to pulp or killed for resisting the failed political and economic status quo which is anchored by corruption and incompetence. The only organization that can stop this is SADC, which is a regional grouping of 16 countries with election protocols that all member states must follow and adhere to. However, ZANUPF has been able to repeatedly violate these protocols for 23 years with the support of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress. ANC is powerful because it runs the most diverse and sophisticated economy on the African continent, so what it says in SADC matters, and what it doesn’t say matters too. Recently the ANC endorsed the shambolic Zimbabwean elections as democratic, ignoring the mountain of evidence to the contrary. It called the Zimbabwean opposition leader a puppet of the West, and it said it will support ZANUPF regardless. Indirectly it called the millions that voted for the opposition puppets of the West too, what motivates the ANC to say such scurrilous stuff if not bungs? So, the ANC literally endorses the causes and drivers of illegal immigration in South Africa, possibly for corrupt reasons, yet when back home it insults Zimbabweans asking them to leave South Africa and go back to Zimbabwe. The ANC is also riding on the xenophobic/anti-foreign nationals’ campaign as seen recently when South Africa's Minister for Police, Bheki Cele took to the highways to personally inspect public transport and remove Zimbabweans without proof on residence on them. This of course is done for politicking reasons, it is an empty explanation to why the economy in South Africa has terribly tanked. ZANUPF blames sanctions for all its failures with the help of Ramaphosa who trumpets the sanctions propaganda everywhere he goes, yet he knows that Zimbabwe has failed due to corrupt rule, incompetence and economic mismanagement. The ANC has now joined the scapegoating bandwagon of blaming foreigners for its failures to govern. It surreptitiously supports Dudula, which is a vigilante group agitating for foreign nationals to leave South Africa regardless of whether they are legal or illegal using the lie that South Africa has collapsed economically due to foreign nationals. Citizens are easy to deceive especially in poor townships, but why are they easily deceived. It is however true that illegal foreign nationals access social and health delivery services in South Africa, creating flash points with locals who complain that they are squeezed out because of the competitive unbudgeted use of public services by illegal foreign nationals. Seventy-five percent of women who give birth at Musina hospital in South Africa’s Limpopo province are Zimbabwean according to the South African Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. This is because Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital only has one working maternity theatre built in 1977 by Ian Smith’s colonial government. 2500 Zimbabwean woman die every year giving birth and as a result, many run away to South Africa to avoid dying when giving birth. This could be easily fixed because a maternity theatre costs only US$37,000 (R666,000) to build, but the Zimbabwean government has failed to do this for its citizens. In a normal society, and in normal times, you simply vote out such an uncaring government, but Zimbabweans have repeatedly tried to do so, but failed due to repression and the failure by SADC to force Zimbabwe to adhere to its constitutional commitments and regional election protocols. The ZANUPF regime has also been repeatdly supported by the ANC and the South African Government on many times to evade this SADC scrutiny as has happened in the recently held shambolic and rigged election, where citizens spent more than 12 hours waiting for ballot papers in opposition strongholds which were 5 minutes away from the election commission offices. It means that South Africa will receive more undocumented Zimbabweans looking for health and social services, and more importantly looking for jobs. South African ANC elites don’t care about this because they don’t use public hospitals, and they don’t live in the townships where there is a shortage of public service amenities. They only care when it is election time, they only care for votes. As South Africa heads towards the 2024 general election, spare a thought for immigrants regardless of whether they are legal or not, particularly African foreign nationals because they will be scapegoated by both the ruling ANC party, and the many fringe one-issue parties that have all congregated around the immigration issue for easy pickings of votes. Immigration is a real crisis in South Africa that has ceased to be a foreign policy issue anymore, it is now a domestic policy issue because it now has the real potential of stopping the ANC from crossing the fifty percent mark in the 2024 elections, forcing the possibility of a coalition government of sorts not out of choice, but out of necessity, a first since 1994. I said the immigration crisis is complex, it has created social pressures in poor communities, but it is not the reason why the South African economy has tanked. Illegal immigration can be fixed by allowing citizens to have free, fair and credible elections particularly in Zimbabwe so that they don’t flock into South Africa, but how can this be possible when the ANC sanitises stolen and shambolic elections? Nobody wants to leave their own home to go to a place where they are not wanted, but they do it because at times it is the difference between living and death. Both South Africa and Zimbabwe require leadership scrutiny, the leaders on both sides of Limpopo are responsible for the immigration crisis, yet it is the poor people that batter each other whilst the politicians are locked away in their mansions. Something must give, the citizens must wake up to the realities of corrupt and incompetent rule and not allow scapegoating to be used as a deceptive tool to explain failed governance. Sadly, it might be too late for 2024, but perhaps the 2024 election result might force the ANC to have a change of heart and for once do the right thing on the Zimbabwe political crisis that has staggered on since 2023.

RETWEET Watching Dimakatso Makoena saying that “I Hate Foreigners” with such raw emotion and painfully crying in this attached BBC documentary film makes you realise how evil and manipulative failed politicians can be towards unsuspecting citizens who are victims of their failures. South Africa has an immigration crisis that can’t be wished away, but it is also a complex problem that can’t be explained in simplistic terms as many try to do, especially the authors of the crisis, politicians. South Africans were not born hating foreign nationals, like racism, they were taught to hate and to believe that all their problems were authored by African foreign nationals, both legal and illegal immigrants. The explanation for every political and economic failure in South Africa is now on foreigners, even someone who can’t get an erection at home will soon probably blame foreigners too. It is true that South Africa has attracted more foreigners than any other country on the continent because of its historic successful and big economy, and how the apartheid economic architecture attracted cheap migrant labour from surrounding countries to maximise on its profits. Apartheid was a racist business model run by politicians and businesspeople, today’s South Africa is also run by one of the richest businesspeople in Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, whose many businesses have benefited from migrant labour. Unlike in the past where mass immigration was triggered mainly by weak economies coming out of colonial rule that surrounded the apartheid regime, the bulk of illegal immigration today is now triggered by failed economies around South Africa particularly Zimbabwe, which has failed due to grand incompetence and political repressive corrupt rule. Why is it like this, and who is responsible for this immigration crisis, and how can this be changed to bring a healthy balance of immigration/migration which is not only one way? This has been caused by a dead economy in Zimbabwe which was killed by corrupt rule and the plunder of that country’s natural resources. Zimbabweans used to find work in Zimbabwe and had working public services like hospitals after that country's independence in 1980, and only went to South Africa to buy things to come and sell back home, it was business from top to bottom. Of course, as I said earlier, there was an earlier flow of migrants from Zimbabwe and other African countries during the colonial days of the famed WNLA which stood for Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), more popularly known as WENELA. It was set up by the gold mines in South Africa as a recruiting agency for migrant workers. Before that people were always moving around the region looking for better pastures and a better standard of living, Africa was a village. That is how you ended up with the Ray Phiris, Hugh Masekelas (whose real surname was Munyepawu from Zimbabwe) and Herman Mashabas of this world. Their parents, grandparents and great grand parents came to South Africa to seek better lives and also to seek work mostly in mines after the nineteenth century, they were born in South Africa to migrant workers or children of migrant workers. Today’s illegal immigration crisis is driven by old factors of cheap labour on the part of South African businesses, and it is accentuated by new political players, the failed regional ruling parties like ZANUPF. In normal countries this is easily resolved by an election where the citizens can choose a different government and remove the crooks and incompetent parties from power. But Zimbabwe is not normal, it has a ruling party which came into power with its own military wings, ZANLA/ZIPRA which became the national army. Elections are routinely rigged, and citizens beaten to pulp or killed for resisting the failed political and economic status quo which is anchored by corruption and incompetence. The only organization that can stop this is SADC, which is a regional grouping of 16 countries with election protocols that all member states must follow and adhere to. However, ZANUPF has been able to repeatedly violate these protocols for 23 years with the support of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress. ANC is powerful because it runs the most diverse and sophisticated economy on the African continent, so what it says in SADC matters, and what it doesn’t say matters too. Recently the ANC endorsed the shambolic Zimbabwean elections as democratic, ignoring the mountain of evidence to the contrary. It called the Zimbabwean opposition leader a puppet of the West, and it said it will support ZANUPF regardless. Indirectly it called the millions that voted for the opposition puppets of the West too, what motivates the ANC to say such scurrilous stuff if not bungs? So, the ANC literally endorses the causes and drivers of illegal immigration in South Africa, possibly for corrupt reasons, yet when back home it insults Zimbabweans asking them to leave South Africa and go back to Zimbabwe. The ANC is also riding on the xenophobic/anti-foreign nationals’ campaign as seen recently when South Africa's Minister for Police, Bheki Cele took to the highways to personally inspect public transport and remove Zimbabweans without proof on residence on them. This of course is done for politicking reasons, it is an empty explanation to why the economy in South Africa has terribly tanked. ZANUPF blames sanctions for all its failures with the help of Ramaphosa who trumpets the sanctions propaganda everywhere he goes, yet he knows that Zimbabwe has failed due to corrupt rule, incompetence and economic mismanagement. The ANC has now joined the scapegoating bandwagon of blaming foreigners for its failures to govern. It surreptitiously supports Dudula, which is a vigilante group agitating for foreign nationals to leave South Africa regardless of whether they are legal or illegal using the lie that South Africa has collapsed economically due to foreign nationals. Citizens are easy to deceive especially in poor townships, but why are they easily deceived. It is however true that illegal foreign nationals access social and health delivery services in South Africa, creating flash points with locals who complain that they are squeezed out because of the competitive unbudgeted use of public services by illegal foreign nationals. Seventy-five percent of women who give birth at Musina hospital in South Africa’s Limpopo province are Zimbabwean according to the South African Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. This is because Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital only has one working maternity theatre built in 1977 by Ian Smith’s colonial government. 2500 Zimbabwean woman die every year giving birth and as a result, many run away to South Africa to avoid dying when giving birth. This could be easily fixed because a maternity theatre costs only US$37,000 (R666,000) to build, but the Zimbabwean government has failed to do this for its citizens. In a normal society, and in normal times, you simply vote out such an uncaring government, but Zimbabweans have repeatedly tried to do so, but failed due to repression and the failure by SADC to force Zimbabwe to adhere to its constitutional commitments and regional election protocols. The ZANUPF regime has also been repeatdly supported by the ANC and the South African Government on many times to evade this SADC scrutiny as has happened in the recently held shambolic and rigged election, where citizens spent more than 12 hours waiting for ballot papers in opposition strongholds which were 5 minutes away from the election commission offices. It means that South Africa will receive more undocumented Zimbabweans looking for health and social services, and more importantly looking for jobs. South African ANC elites don’t care about this because they don’t use public hospitals, and they don’t live in the townships where there is a shortage of public service amenities. They only care when it is election time, they only care for votes. As South Africa heads towards the 2024 general election, spare a thought for immigrants regardless of whether they are legal or not, particularly African foreign nationals because they will be scapegoated by both the ruling ANC party, and the many fringe one-issue parties that have all congregated around the immigration issue for easy pickings of votes. Immigration is a real crisis in South Africa that has ceased to be a foreign policy issue anymore, it is now a domestic policy issue because it now has the real potential of stopping the ANC from crossing the fifty percent mark in the 2024 elections, forcing the possibility of a coalition government of sorts not out of choice, but out of necessity, a first since 1994. I said the immigration crisis is complex, it has created social pressures in poor communities, but it is not the reason why the South African economy has tanked. Illegal immigration can be fixed by allowing citizens to have free, fair and credible elections particularly in Zimbabwe so that they don’t flock into South Africa, but how can this be possible when the ANC sanitises stolen and shambolic elections? Nobody wants to leave their own home to go to a place where they are not wanted, but they do it because at times it is the difference between living and death. Both South Africa and Zimbabwe require leadership scrutiny, the leaders on both sides of Limpopo are responsible for the immigration crisis, yet it is the poor people that batter each other whilst the politicians are locked away in their mansions. Something must give, the citizens must wake up to the realities of corrupt and incompetent rule and not allow scapegoating to be used as a deceptive tool to explain failed governance. Sadly, it might be too late for 2024, but perhaps the 2024 election result might force the ANC to have a change of heart and for once do the right thing on the Zimbabwe political crisis that has staggered on since 2023.

Hopewell Chin’ono

179,438 görüntüleme • 3 yıl önce

On Zero 10 at Art Basel 2026 When I heard Zero 10 was coming to Art Basel, the first thing I felt wasn't curiosity about the art. It was the chance to finally stand in a room with people I'd only ever known through a screen and talk about where our space actually is right now. I went in wearing two hats and trying to keep both on at once. One was the curious visitor: how does digital art even get communicated inside an institution like this? The other I can't take off. Someone who comes from the underground core of this scene. I made myself a promise on the way in. No "fuck this, it's all cringe." Neutral. Open. Give it everything before I judge anything. And for a while, it earned that. The first thing Zero 10 gets right is that it doesn't feel like a side fair, even though that's exactly what it is. Visually it holds the moment. Without saying it out loud, it tells you Art Basel is serious about this now. Not dabbling, not hedging its bets. The first works I saw were John Gerrard's triptych of flags, and they set the tone instantly. They're gorgeous. Someone walking in cold might not even clock them as simulations. They might think they're looking at a live feed. That's the point. The room opens by declaring, in the most aesthetic way possible: *this is the zeitgeist of digital art.* Hold onto that sentence. I'll come back to it. Walking through, I slowly understood what Eli Scheinman and Trevor Paglen were actually doing. This wasn't Miami, where every phone in the room was pointed at Beeple's robot dogs and the whole thing tipped into spectacle, which, to be fair, worked exactly as intended. Basel was something else. Didactic in the good sense. A guided walk through the history of digital art, screens and physical works, old and new, woven together until the seams disappeared. For someone like me, who has been pushing back on the flattening, the lazy reflex that files Autoglyphs and Fidenza in the same drawer as 10k flip projects, this was genuinely moving to see. Someone built a room that takes this work seriously enough to give it a lineage. That matters. I don't want to undersell how much it matters. Then I hit Avery Singer's *Shit Coin Maxi*, hung by Hauser & Wirth, and that's the exact moment something turned. It's a good title, or it was. That's almost the problem. "Shit coin" is already dead vocabulary. That word had its currency back in Cobie's peak era, and nobody current talks like that anymore. So a painting made in 2025 reaching for it reads less like the present than like nostalgia for a moment that already passed. I'm not mad at the work. I'm noting what it represents. A blue-chip painter borrowing a word that signaled "now" a couple of cycles ago, hung in the room that's claiming to show us the actual now. The strongest culture of the last few years got made by people with no institutional cover, and what makes it onto a blue-chip wall is the part already legible to the institution, smoothed down into something sellable. So the present wasn't absent from the room. It was here, absorbed, translated into a dialect the fair already understands. Which made me start looking for the other version of it. The one that hasn't been translated yet. The thing that's still hot to the touch. It wasn't there. Not a single artist or movement in the room represented the current moment on its own terms. Someone will say that's just my perspective, and fine. But let's be real. The wildest movement of the last cycle happened on Solana, through meme coins, and out of that chaos came an NFT scene with its own dynamic and a handful of genuinely outstanding artists building a language that deserves a place in the canon. Avant NFTs, Gay NFTs, tongue-licking-the-flame NFTs, whatever you want to call them. That language isn't a footnote. Read properly, it throws new light backward. It's what finally lets the 2021 work and everything before it be seen as something other than cartoon monkeys. The current scene is the key to the historical one. Leave it out and the history you're telling is missing the part that shows the conversation has moved past 2021 bag holders praying for the mass adoption where the world wakes up and decides Tyler Hobbs is sexier than Ida Ekblad. And before anyone reads this as an NFT guy asking for more NFTs: that's the reduction, and the reduction is the whole problem. What's missing isn't a market category. It's a way of working. Artists using the blockchain like a studio, not to mint jpegs but to build whole worlds, weaving AI, physical objects, writing, and community into one continuous practice instead of separate outputs. That is digital art. That is AI art. The two things this show says it's about. Which is what makes the omission strange. Zero 10 sorts everything into clean bins, AI over here, generative over there, a physical piece on the wall, exactly when the work that's most alive is the work dissolving those bins. The filing system is the tell. It organizes the present with the categories of the past. Which brings me back to that opening declaration. *This is the zeitgeist of digital art.* Except those flags weren't new. *Western Flag* dates to 2017. The newest of the three is 2023. The works chosen to announce the present were themselves already the past. Fellowship framed the triptych as a nine-year body of work, the oldest piece nearly a decade old. A zeitgeist on a delay. None of this makes the work bad, but digital culture doesn't run on museum time, and work that felt current when it was made can read as historical by the time it's framed as the now. Is it even one, then? I mean that as a real question, not a gotcha. A zeitgeist is the spirit of a time, and a spirit can only belong to the people living inside it. So what happens when the previous generation is the one interpreting what the current generation's culture looks like? Does it stay a zeitgeist, or quietly become a retrospective wearing the zeitgeist's clothes? You named the whole platform after Malevich's *0,10*, the show where Suprematism reduced everything to zero and started over. You set your own bar at rupture. And the one thing the room didn't show me was the rupture happening outside its walls. This isn't sentiment, either. The last Art Basel and UBS survey put it plainly: Millennials and Gen Z now make up roughly three-quarters of high-net-worth collectors, and more than half of those collectors bought a digital work in the past year. The new generation isn't the future of this market. It's the present tense. Defining their culture for them, from above, doesn't just feel off. It misreads the room it's standing in. So let me end where my excitement actually lives. For years, the part of Art Basel I loved most wasn't the main fair. It was Liste. The young galleries, the disruptive positions, the work that hadn't been sorted or priced or canonized yet. That's where you went to feel something. Zero 10 could be that. It has the bones to become the room that hits you awake before the main halls lull you back to sleep. The cold water before the warm bath. The place you walk through first, get rattled, feel your pulse, and only then go get comfortable. That's the highest thing I can imagine for it, and it's within reach. The frame is right. The seriousness is right. What's missing is the nerve to let the people making the present define what it looks like. Get that part right, and Zero 10 won't be showing us the zeitgeist. It'll be where the zeitgeist is.

On Zero 10 at Art Basel 2026 When I heard Zero 10 was coming to Art Basel, the first thing I felt wasn't curiosity about the art. It was the chance to finally stand in a room with people I'd only ever known through a screen and talk about where our space actually is right now. I went in wearing two hats and trying to keep both on at once. One was the curious visitor: how does digital art even get communicated inside an institution like this? The other I can't take off. Someone who comes from the underground core of this scene. I made myself a promise on the way in. No "fuck this, it's all cringe." Neutral. Open. Give it everything before I judge anything. And for a while, it earned that. The first thing Zero 10 gets right is that it doesn't feel like a side fair, even though that's exactly what it is. Visually it holds the moment. Without saying it out loud, it tells you Art Basel is serious about this now. Not dabbling, not hedging its bets. The first works I saw were John Gerrard's triptych of flags, and they set the tone instantly. They're gorgeous. Someone walking in cold might not even clock them as simulations. They might think they're looking at a live feed. That's the point. The room opens by declaring, in the most aesthetic way possible: this is the zeitgeist of digital art. Hold onto that sentence. I'll come back to it. Walking through, I slowly understood what Eli Scheinman and Trevor Paglen were actually doing. This wasn't Miami, where every phone in the room was pointed at Beeple's robot dogs and the whole thing tipped into spectacle, which, to be fair, worked exactly as intended. Basel was something else. Didactic in the good sense. A guided walk through the history of digital art, screens and physical works, old and new, woven together until the seams disappeared. For someone like me, who has been pushing back on the flattening, the lazy reflex that files Autoglyphs and Fidenza in the same drawer as 10k flip projects, this was genuinely moving to see. Someone built a room that takes this work seriously enough to give it a lineage. That matters. I don't want to undersell how much it matters. Then I hit Avery Singer's Shit Coin Maxi, hung by Hauser & Wirth, and that's the exact moment something turned. It's a good title, or it was. That's almost the problem. "Shit coin" is already dead vocabulary. That word had its currency back in Cobie's peak era, and nobody current talks like that anymore. So a painting made in 2025 reaching for it reads less like the present than like nostalgia for a moment that already passed. I'm not mad at the work. I'm noting what it represents. A blue-chip painter borrowing a word that signaled "now" a couple of cycles ago, hung in the room that's claiming to show us the actual now. The strongest culture of the last few years got made by people with no institutional cover, and what makes it onto a blue-chip wall is the part already legible to the institution, smoothed down into something sellable. So the present wasn't absent from the room. It was here, absorbed, translated into a dialect the fair already understands. Which made me start looking for the other version of it. The one that hasn't been translated yet. The thing that's still hot to the touch. It wasn't there. Not a single artist or movement in the room represented the current moment on its own terms. Someone will say that's just my perspective, and fine. But let's be real. The wildest movement of the last cycle happened on Solana, through meme coins, and out of that chaos came an NFT scene with its own dynamic and a handful of genuinely outstanding artists building a language that deserves a place in the canon. Avant NFTs, Gay NFTs, tongue-licking-the-flame NFTs, whatever you want to call them. That language isn't a footnote. Read properly, it throws new light backward. It's what finally lets the 2021 work and everything before it be seen as something other than cartoon monkeys. The current scene is the key to the historical one. Leave it out and the history you're telling is missing the part that shows the conversation has moved past 2021 bag holders praying for the mass adoption where the world wakes up and decides Tyler Hobbs is sexier than Ida Ekblad. And before anyone reads this as an NFT guy asking for more NFTs: that's the reduction, and the reduction is the whole problem. What's missing isn't a market category. It's a way of working. Artists using the blockchain like a studio, not to mint jpegs but to build whole worlds, weaving AI, physical objects, writing, and community into one continuous practice instead of separate outputs. That is digital art. That is AI art. The two things this show says it's about. Which is what makes the omission strange. Zero 10 sorts everything into clean bins, AI over here, generative over there, a physical piece on the wall, exactly when the work that's most alive is the work dissolving those bins. The filing system is the tell. It organizes the present with the categories of the past. Which brings me back to that opening declaration. This is the zeitgeist of digital art. Except those flags weren't new. Western Flag dates to 2017. The newest of the three is 2023. The works chosen to announce the present were themselves already the past. Fellowship framed the triptych as a nine-year body of work, the oldest piece nearly a decade old. A zeitgeist on a delay. None of this makes the work bad, but digital culture doesn't run on museum time, and work that felt current when it was made can read as historical by the time it's framed as the now. Is it even one, then? I mean that as a real question, not a gotcha. A zeitgeist is the spirit of a time, and a spirit can only belong to the people living inside it. So what happens when the previous generation is the one interpreting what the current generation's culture looks like? Does it stay a zeitgeist, or quietly become a retrospective wearing the zeitgeist's clothes? You named the whole platform after Malevich's 0,10, the show where Suprematism reduced everything to zero and started over. You set your own bar at rupture. And the one thing the room didn't show me was the rupture happening outside its walls. This isn't sentiment, either. The last Art Basel and UBS survey put it plainly: Millennials and Gen Z now make up roughly three-quarters of high-net-worth collectors, and more than half of those collectors bought a digital work in the past year. The new generation isn't the future of this market. It's the present tense. Defining their culture for them, from above, doesn't just feel off. It misreads the room it's standing in. So let me end where my excitement actually lives. For years, the part of Art Basel I loved most wasn't the main fair. It was Liste. The young galleries, the disruptive positions, the work that hadn't been sorted or priced or canonized yet. That's where you went to feel something. Zero 10 could be that. It has the bones to become the room that hits you awake before the main halls lull you back to sleep. The cold water before the warm bath. The place you walk through first, get rattled, feel your pulse, and only then go get comfortable. That's the highest thing I can imagine for it, and it's within reach. The frame is right. The seriousness is right. What's missing is the nerve to let the people making the present define what it looks like. Get that part right, and Zero 10 won't be showing us the zeitgeist. It'll be where the zeitgeist is.

VVV.SO

15,724 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce

Hannah Spencer delivers her second speech in parliament, and does so on the Royal Address on behalf of the Green party "And this is only the second time I have made a speech here, so I hope you will all bear with me if I get any protocols wrong. Um. In my maiden speech, I gave a shout-out to the many professions and communities that haven't been well represented here in Parliament in the past, and I made a promise to help give them a voice." "And today it feels especially important to keep that promise because there's sadly not enough in the King's Speech that is going to make their lives significantly better. And that is why us Greens have tabled a reasoned amendment for all the people working hard, or to raise a family, or to just get through each day, because everyone deserves a safety net and a chance to get ahead." "For everyone who wants things to be different, one in three households in Gorton and Denton live in fuel poverty, and the UK has got some of the leakiest homes in Europe. And I know that because I have worked on thousands of them in my last job as a plumber." "And so if we want to cut energy bills for good, we really do need a properly funded and a properly regulated national home insulation scheme, and to go even bigger on renewable energy. And that is where investment should be going, not into nuclear power." "And the King's Speech includes some steps in the right direction, but it is nothing like the transformative, progressive programme that this moment demands. It doesn't rise to the climate and nature crisis that is happening now, and that's a crisis that can't be separated from the inequality and cost-of-living crises that are happening too, because it is always the poorest people that suffer the most here in our country and around the world." "And while certain people will claim that climate action is pushing up bills, we know that that isn't true, and we know that some of the people saying that are being bankrolled by the very companies causing climate destruction and ripping off our constituents." "And the Representation of the People Bill must go further on cleaning up politics because a greener, more affordable, more secure future is possible if you stand up to those vested interests and if we're prepared to admit that obscene wealth is damaging our country." "And people out there are so angry at the gap between the super, super rich and all the rest of us getting even bigger, and they want something equally big done about it. They don't want any child to go hungry, and they know that a free hot school meal for every child up to the age of 16 is possible if extreme wealth is taxed fairly." "They want public transport to be more affordable, and they know that we could start by giving free bus passes to all the under-22s, again, paid for by our tax system being made fairer." "They want everyone to have a roof over their head, to get a doctor's or a dentist appointment without struggle, and for the NHS to be run for the public good, not to line shareholders' pockets. And they know that change is possible if only this government, a Labour government, would tax extreme wealth fairly." "Our Green amendment includes new powers to control rents. Greens welcomed the changes in the Renters Reform Act and now plans for more social housing. But far too many people are still struggling to pay their rent and make ends meet. So alongside action to bring down energy and water bills, it is time to get a grip on the cost of renting too." "And now I was elected to give a voice to a politics that truly represents everyone. This is the first King's Speech I've been in Parliament to hear, and honestly, what I'm hearing isn't gonna give everyone the meaningful change that we and they all know is possible." "So Greens will have no hesitation to use our individual and collective voices over the coming months to welcome progress when it's made, but crucially, to demand the change that people were promised and the change that people deserve to have." "Thank you. Hear, hear."

Hannah Spencer delivers her second speech in parliament, and does so on the Royal Address on behalf of the Green party "And this is only the second time I have made a speech here, so I hope you will all bear with me if I get any protocols wrong. Um. In my maiden speech, I gave a shout-out to the many professions and communities that haven't been well represented here in Parliament in the past, and I made a promise to help give them a voice." "And today it feels especially important to keep that promise because there's sadly not enough in the King's Speech that is going to make their lives significantly better. And that is why us Greens have tabled a reasoned amendment for all the people working hard, or to raise a family, or to just get through each day, because everyone deserves a safety net and a chance to get ahead." "For everyone who wants things to be different, one in three households in Gorton and Denton live in fuel poverty, and the UK has got some of the leakiest homes in Europe. And I know that because I have worked on thousands of them in my last job as a plumber." "And so if we want to cut energy bills for good, we really do need a properly funded and a properly regulated national home insulation scheme, and to go even bigger on renewable energy. And that is where investment should be going, not into nuclear power." "And the King's Speech includes some steps in the right direction, but it is nothing like the transformative, progressive programme that this moment demands. It doesn't rise to the climate and nature crisis that is happening now, and that's a crisis that can't be separated from the inequality and cost-of-living crises that are happening too, because it is always the poorest people that suffer the most here in our country and around the world." "And while certain people will claim that climate action is pushing up bills, we know that that isn't true, and we know that some of the people saying that are being bankrolled by the very companies causing climate destruction and ripping off our constituents." "And the Representation of the People Bill must go further on cleaning up politics because a greener, more affordable, more secure future is possible if you stand up to those vested interests and if we're prepared to admit that obscene wealth is damaging our country." "And people out there are so angry at the gap between the super, super rich and all the rest of us getting even bigger, and they want something equally big done about it. They don't want any child to go hungry, and they know that a free hot school meal for every child up to the age of 16 is possible if extreme wealth is taxed fairly." "They want public transport to be more affordable, and they know that we could start by giving free bus passes to all the under-22s, again, paid for by our tax system being made fairer." "They want everyone to have a roof over their head, to get a doctor's or a dentist appointment without struggle, and for the NHS to be run for the public good, not to line shareholders' pockets. And they know that change is possible if only this government, a Labour government, would tax extreme wealth fairly." "Our Green amendment includes new powers to control rents. Greens welcomed the changes in the Renters Reform Act and now plans for more social housing. But far too many people are still struggling to pay their rent and make ends meet. So alongside action to bring down energy and water bills, it is time to get a grip on the cost of renting too." "And now I was elected to give a voice to a politics that truly represents everyone. This is the first King's Speech I've been in Parliament to hear, and honestly, what I'm hearing isn't gonna give everyone the meaningful change that we and they all know is possible." "So Greens will have no hesitation to use our individual and collective voices over the coming months to welcome progress when it's made, but crucially, to demand the change that people were promised and the change that people deserve to have." "Thank you. Hear, hear."

Farrukh

441,485 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce